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| St. Paul's, London |
People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil.
It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding.
~Glenn T. SeaborgThe 56th day of the year; There are 56 normalized 5x5 Latin Squares (First row and column have 1,2,3,4,5; and no number appears twice in a row or column. There are a much smaller number of 4x4 squares, try them first)
EVENTS
1598 John Dee demonstrates the solar eclipse by viewing an image through a pinhole. Two versions from Ashmole and Aubrey give different details of who was present. Dee's Diary only contains the notation, "the eclips. A clowdy day, but great darkness about 9 1/2 maine " *Benjamin Wooley, The Queen's Conjuror 1606 Henry Briggs sends a Letter to Mr. Clarke, of Gravesend, dated from Gresham College, with which he sends him the description of a ruler, called Bedwell's ruler, with directions how to use it. (it seems from the letter to be a ruler for measuring the volume of timber. If you have information on where I could see a picture or other image of the device, please advise) *Augustus De Morgan, Correspondence of scientific men of the seventeenth century
1870 Hermann Amandus Schwarz sent his friend Georg Cantor a letter containing the first rigorous proof of the theorem that if the derivative of a function vanishes then the function is constant. See H. Meschkowski, Ways of Thought of Great Mathematicians, pp. 87–89 for an English translation of the letter. *VFR
1959 The APT Language is Demonstrated: The Automatically Programmed Tools language is demonstrated. APT is an English-like language that tells tools how to work and is mainly used in computer-assisted manufacturing.
NEW YORKER: Cambridge, Mass. - Feb. 25: The Air Force announced today that it has a machine that can receive instructions in English - figure out how to make whatever is wanted- and teach other machines how to make it. An Air Force general said it will enable the United States to build a war machine that nobody would want to tackle. Today it made an ashtray. *CHM
BIRTHS
1670 Maria Winckelmann (Maria Margarethe Winckelmann Kirch (25 Feb 1670 in Panitzsch, near Leipzig, Germany - 29 Dec 1720 in Berlin, Germany) was a German astronomer who helped her husband with his observations. She was the first woman to discover a comet.*SAU 1827 Henry William Watson (25 Feb 1827 in Marylebone, London, England - 11 Jan 1903 in Berkswell (near Coventry), England) was an English mathematician who wrote some influential text-books on electricity and magnetism. *SAU
1902 Kenjiro Shoda (February 25, 1902 – March 3, 1977 *SAU gives March 20 for death) was a Japanese mathematician. He was interested in group theory, and went to Berlin to work with Issai Schur. After one year in Berlin, Shoda went to Göttingen to study with Emmy Noether. Noether's school brought a mathematical growth to him. In 1929 he returned to Japan. Soon afterwards, he began to write Abstract Algebra, his mathematical textbook in Japanese for advanced learners. It was published in 1932 and soon recognised as a significant work for mathematics in Japan. It became a standard textbook and was reprinted many times.*Wik
1922 Ernst Gabor Straus (February 25, 1922 – July 12, 1983) was a German-American mathematician who helped found the theories of Euclidean Ramsey theory and of the arithmetic properties of analytic functions. His extensive list of co-authors includes Albert Einstein and Paul Erdős as well as other notable researchers including Richard Bellman, Béla Bollobás, Sarvadaman Chowla, Ronald Graham, László Lovász, Carl Pomerance, and George Szekeres. It is due to his collaboration with Straus that Einstein has Erdős number 2. *Wik
1926 Masatoşi Gündüz İkeda (25 February 1926, Tokyo. - 9 February 2003, Ankara), was a Turkish mathematician of Japanese ancestry, known for his contributions to the field of algebraic number theory. *Wik
DEATHS
1786 Thomas Wright (22 September 1711 – 25 February 1786) was an English astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker, architect and garden designer. He was the first to describe the shape of the Milky Way and speculate that faint nebulae were distant galaxies.*Wik
1947 Louis Carl Heinrich Friedrich Paschen (22 Jan 1865; 25 Feb 1947) was a German physicist who was an outstanding experimental spectroscopist. In 1895, in a detailed study of the spectral series of helium, an element then newly discovered on earth, he showed the identical match with the spectral lines of helium as originally found in the solar spectrum by Janssen and Lockyer nearly 40 years earlier. He is remembered for the Paschen Series of spectral lines of hydrogen which he elucidated in 1908. *TIS
1950 Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, (also spelled Lusin) (9 December 1883, Irkutsk – 28 January 1950, Moscow), was a Soviet/Russian mathematician known for his work in descriptive set theory and aspects of mathematical analysis with strong connections to point-set topology. He was the eponym of Luzitania, a loose group of young Moscow mathematicians of the first half of the 1920s. They adopted his set-theoretic orientation, and went on to apply it in other areas of mathematics.*Wik
1972 Władysław Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus (January 14, 1887 – February 25, 1972) was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the University of Lwów, where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering" mathematician Stefan Banach, with whom he gave a notable contribution to functional analysis through the Banach-Steinhaus theorem. After World War II Steinhaus played an important part in the establishment of the mathematics department at Wrocław University and in the revival of Polish mathematics from the destruction of the war.
Author of around 170 scientific articles and books, Steinhaus has left its legacy and contribution on many branches of mathematics, such as functional analysis, geometry, mathematical logic, and trigonometry. Notably he is regarded as one of the early founders of the game theory and the probability theory preceding in his studies, later, more comprehensive approaches, by other scholars. *Wik
His Mathematical Snapshots is a delight to read, but get the first English edition if you can—there are lots of surprises there. *VFR
1988 Kurt Mahler (26 July 1903, Krefeld, Germany – 25 February 1988, Canberra, Australia) was a mathematician and Fellow of the Royal Society. Mahler proved that the Prouhet–Thue–Morse constant and the Champernowne constant 0.1234567891011121314151617181920... are transcendental numbers.
He was a student at the universities in Frankfurt and Göttingen, graduating with a Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in 1927. He left Germany with the rise of Hitler and accepted an invitation by Louis Mordell to go to Manchester. He became a British citizen in 1946.
He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1948 and a member of the Australian Academy of Science in 1965. He was awarded the London Mathematical Society's Senior Berwick Prize in 1950, the De Morgan Medal, 1971, and the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal, 1977. *Wik
1999 Glenn Theodore Seaborg (April 19, 1912(Ishpeming, Michigan) – February 25, 1999) was an American scientist who won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements", contributed to the discovery and isolation of ten elements, and developed the actinide concept, which led to the current arrangement of the actinoid series in the periodic table of the elements. He spent most of his career as an educator and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley where he became the second Chancellor in its history and served as a University Professor. Seaborg advised ten presidents from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton on nuclear policy and was the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971 where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and peaceful applications of nuclear science.
The element seaborgium was named after Seaborg by Albert Ghiorso, E. Kenneth Hulet, and others, who also credited Seaborg as a co-discoverer. It was so named while Seaborg was still alive, which proved controversial. He influenced the naming of so many elements that with the announcement of seaborgium, it was noted in Discover magazine's review of the year in science that he could receive a letter addressed in chemical elements: seaborgium, lawrencium (for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where he worked), berkelium, californium, americium
(Once when being aggressively cross-examined during testimony on nuclear energy for a senate committee, the Senator asked, “How much do you really know about Plutonium.” Seaborg quietly answered, “Sir, I discovered it.” , Which he did as part of the team at the Manhattan Project. *Wik
Credits
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
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