…separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible.
~Werner Heisenberg
The 339th day of the year; the plane can be divided into 339 regions with 13 hyperbolae. There are also 339 possible 2x2 matrices with integer entries between zero and 13.
EVENTS
1610 Benedetto Castelli, a former student of Galileo, wrote him, that if Copernicus was correct, Venus should sometimes appear “horned” and sometimes not. *VFR (Venus is at its brightest as it approaches Earth, when it appears as a crescent. Many cultures around the world describe it as the 'horned star', which suggests that early astronomers, although lacking telescopes, could somehow make out its crescent shape.)
1658 Simon Douw wins court judgement against Christian Huygen.
“Today, no clock by Simon Douw is known; I find that most curious, it is as if he has been excised from history, deliberately. Dutch Court papers described Douw as "City clockmaker of Rotterdam... a master in the art of great tower, domestic or office clocks", ("en meester in de kunst van groote Toorn, Camer ofte Comptoirwerken"). Yet his mechanical insights. his escapement, also his drive mechanisms, are best, and now only, revealed by his Patent Grant on* Keith Piggottm, antique Horology
August 9th, 1658, and by the evidence and judgement in a claim and counterclaim
started in the Provinces of Holland and West Friesland, but then
referred to the Court of The Netherlands in October 1658, with a Judgement
by Consent on December 5th, 1658. And that case went entirely in Douw's
favour, against the highly favoured joint Complainants Huygens and Coster.
In itself, that is remarkable. Huygens, the Noble patrician, the most famous
Dutch scientist, and the self-professed inventor of the pendulum clock, who
had in the course of this trial published "Horologium", was forced by the
judges to settle the case rather than face unfavourable verdict; also to concede
Consent; also one-third Royalties to Douw. It would have been a crushing
humiliation for Huygens, the seed of his libels. Subsequently, the Lower
Court of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland confirmed to Douw, on December
16th and 19th 1658, their Upper Court's judgement by consent”.
1735 Euler presents his paper on “The sums of Series of reciprocals” to the St Petersburg Academy. Regarding the series 1+1/4 + 1/9 …. he writes, “I have shown the sum of the series to be approximately 1.644934066842264364 (“Euler calculates as other men breath”); multiplying the number by six, and then taking the square root.. “ and he shows that it is equal to pi, again expressed to nineteen digits accuracy. He then found the sum of the series of powers of the harmonic sequence for n= 4,6,8, 10 and 12
1776 The first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at William and Mary College in Virginia. *VFR
1825 Abel wrote how delighted he was that Crelle was starting a new mathematics journal, for it meant he would now have a place to publish his researches. The first volume contained seven papers by Abel*VFR
1883 Sylvester, in Baltimore, received a cable containing the single word “Elected,” informing him of his appointment as Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford. This ended his seven year stay at Johns Hopkins. *Osiris, 1(1936), 150
1890 Harold Jacoby, later head of the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University, proposed at a meeting of the New York Mathematical Society that they publish a bulletin. In October 1891, the first issue of the Bulletin of the New York Mathematical Society, A Historical and Critical Review of Mathematical Science appeared. *VFR
1941 Zuse Completes Z3 Machine: Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 computer, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It followed in the footsteps of the Z1 - the world’s first binary digital computer - which Zuse had developed in 1938. Much of Zuse’s work was destroyed in World War II, although the Z4, the most sophisticated of his creations, survives. *CHM
1965 The First Ph.D. Dissertation in Computer Science is Presented;
Richard L.Wexelblat was the first candidate in a computer science program to complete a dissertation. Many doctorate candidates had performed computer-related work, but Wexelblat’s diploma, presented by the University of Pennsylvania - the home of the ENIAC - was the first one to carry the designation computer science.*CHM
BIRTHS
1863 Paul Painlevé (5 Dec 1863; 29 Oct 1933) French politician, mathematician, and patron of aviation. Painlevé received a doctorate in mathematics from Paris in 1887. In his work on differential equations and mechanics, he solved, using Painlevé functions, differential equations which Poincaré and Picard had failed to solve. He took a special interest in aviation, applying his theoretical skills to study the theory of flight. He was Wilbur Wright's first passenger making a record 1 hr 10 min flight, then within a year he created the first university course in aeronautical mechanics. Although less skilled in politics than mathematics he began a political career in 1906 leading to two periods as French Prime Minister at a crucial period of World War I and again during the 1925 financial crisis. *TIS
1868 Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld (5 December 1868 – 26 April 1951) was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and groomed a large number of students for the new era of theoretical physics. He was nominated a record 81 times for the Nobel Prize, and served as PhD supervisor for more Nobel prize winners in physics than any other supervisor before or since. He introduced the 2nd quantum number (azimuthal quantum number) and the 4th quantum number (spin quantum number). He also introduced the fine-structure constant, and pioneered X-ray wave theory.*Wik
1895 Elbert Frank Cox (December 5, 1895–November 28, 1969) was an American mathematician who became the first black person in the world to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. He spent most of his life as a professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was known as an excellent teacher. During his life, he overcame various difficulties which arose because of his race. In his honor, the National Association of Mathematicians established the Cox-Talbot Address, which is annually delivered at the NAM's national meetings. The Elbert F. Cox Scholarship Fund, which is used to help black students pursue studies, is named in his honor as well.*Wik
1901 Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 Dec 1901; 1 Feb 1976) was the German physicist and philosopher who discovered a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices (1925). For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932. In 1927 he published his indeterminacy, or uncertainty, principle, upon which he built his philosophy and for which he is best known. He also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulence, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and elementary particles, and he planned the first post-World War II German nuclear reactor, at Karlsruhe, then in West Germany. *TIS
1903 Cecil Frank Powell (5 Dec 1903; 9 Aug 1969) British physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950 for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of the pion (pi-meson), a heavy subatomic particle. The pion proved to be the hypothetical particle proposed in 1935 by Yukawa Hideki of Japan in his theory. *TIS
1932 Sheldon Lee Glashow (5 Dec 1932, ) American theoretical physicist who, with Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for their complementary efforts in formulating the electroweak theory, which explains the unity of electromagnetism and the weak force.*TIS
DEATHS
1708 Takakazu Seki March (1642 in Fujioka, Kozuke, Japan
- 5 Dec 1708 in Edo (now Tokyo), Japan) was a Japanese mathematician who was the first person to study determinants. He also discovered Bernoulli numbers before Jacob Bernoulli. *SAU
1770 James Stirling (1692, 5 Dec 1770) Scottish mathematician who contributed important advances to the theory of infinite series and infinitesimal calculus. His most important book, Methodus Differentialis (1730), was written while in London. It is a treatise on infinite series, summation, interpolation and quadrature, and the text includes the asymptotic formula for n! for which Stirling is best known. In 1735 he returned to Scotland where he became manager of the 'Scotch mining company, Leadhills'. In 1745 Stirling published a paper on the ventilation of mine shafts. *TIS
1859 Louis Poinsot was the inventor of geometrical mechanics, investigating how a system of forces acting on a rigid body could be resolved into a single force and a couple.*SAU
1973 Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt (13 Apr 1892, 5 Dec 1973) Scottish physicist who is credited with the development of radar location of aircraft, in England. He studied at St Andrews University, taught at Dundee University, and in 1917 worked in the Meteorological Office, designing devices to locate thunderstorms, and investigating the ionosphere (a term he invented in 1926). He became head of the radio section of the National Physical Laboratory (1935), where he began work on locating aircraft. His work led to the development of radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) which played a vital role in the defence of Britain against German air raids in 1940. He was knighted in 1942. *TIS
1999 Nathan Jacobson (October 5, 1910, Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire — December 5, 1999, Hamden, Connecticut) was an American mathematician.
Born in Warsaw, Jacobson emigrated to America with his Jewish family in 1918. Recognized as one of the leading algebraists of his generation, he was also famous for writing more than a dozen standard textbooks. *Wik
2001 Franco Dino Rasetti (August 10, 1901 – December 5, 2001) was an Italian scientist. Together with Enrico Fermi, he discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. Rasetti refused to work on the Manhattan Project, however, on moral grounds.*Wik
2005 Claude Ambrose Rogers (1 Nov 1920, 5 Dec 2005) wrote extensively on Number Theory and on Sphere-packing problems.Roger's continues to produce a remarkable mathematical output having published to date over 170 papers. His early work was on number theory and he wrote on Diophantine inequalities and the geometry of numbers. Jointly with Erdős, he wrote The covering of n-dimensional space by spheres (1953) and Covering space with convex bodies (1961), writing many other articles on coverings and packings including Covering space with equal spheres with Coxeter. His later work covered a wide range of different topics in geometry and analysis including Borel functions, Hausdorff measure and local measure, topological properties of Banach spaces and upper semicontinuous functions. Rogers has written two important books, Packing and Covering in 1964 and Hausdorff Measures in 1970. *SAU
Credits
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*CHM=Computer History Museum
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