The mathematics are distinguished by
a particular privilege, that is,
in the course of ages, they may always advance
and can never recede.
~Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The 148th day of the year; 148 "Primelicious", 21 + 1 is prime,24 + 1 is prime, and 28 + 1, and the three results add to a prime, 3+17+257 = 277. Looking for more Primelicious numbers.
EVENTS
669 BC "If the Sun at its rising is like a crescent and wears a crown like the Moon: the king wll capture his enemy's land; evil will leave the land, and (the land) will experience good . . . " Refers to a solar eclipse of 27 May 669 BC. BY Rasil the older, Babylonian scribe to the king. *NSEC1638 In a letter to Fr Marin Mersenne, Descartes claimed to have a general rule to find number n with a sum of its factors S(n) given only the ratio of n:S(n) = p/q. He showed that n:S(n) = 4/9 is solved for n= 360 . Fermat responded to Mersenne that 2016 has the same property.. (for students, S(6) would = 1+2+3+6 = 12) (History of the theory of numbers By Leonard Eugene Dickson)
1832 In a letter to Legendre, Jacobi stated that the solutions to x2-ay2=1 can be expressed in terms of the sine and cosine of
1849 Chebyshev defends his doctoral dissertation on the theory of numbers at Petersburg University.*VFR
1919 Astronomical party arrives at São Tomé and Príncipe, officially the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, is a Portuguese-speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. Príncipe was the site where astronomical observations of the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 confirmed Einstein's prediction of the curvature of light. The expedition was sponsored by the Royal Society and led by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington.
1937 Golden Gate bridge opened.*VFR In 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco was first opened to the public as a Pedestrian Day. By 6 am, 18,000 people were waiting for the toll gates to open. Many crossed in unique ways, hoping to be prize-winners as the first to establish a record, whether by walking backwards or on stilts, tap-dancing, roller-skating or playing instruments. It was a sprinter, Donald Bryan, from San Francisco Junior College, who became the first person to cross the entire span. At 10 am, Chief engineer Joseph Strauss gave no speech, but instead read a poem he had written for the event. By the end of the day, about 200,000 people had joined the celebration. The bridge was ceremonially opened to traffic the next day.*TIS
BIRTHS
1332 Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun (full name, Arabic: أبو زيد عبد الرحمن بن محمد بن خلدون الحضرمي, Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Raḥmān bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn Al-Ḥaḍrami, May 27, 1332 AD/732 AH – March 19, 1406 AD/808 AH) was a Muslim historiographer and historian who is often viewed as one of the fathers of modern historiography,sociology and economics.He is best known for his Muqaddimah (known as Prolegomenon in English), which was discovered, evaluated and fully appreciated first by 19th century European scholarship, although it has also had considerable influence on 17th-century Ottoman historians like Ḥajjī Khalīfa and Mustafa Naima who relied on his theories to analyze the growth and decline of the Ottoman Empire. Later in the 19th century, Western scholars recognized him as one of the greatest philosophers to come out of the Muslim world. *Wik
1660 Francis Hauksbee the elder (baptized on 27 May 1660 in Colchester–buried in St Dunstan's-in-the-West, London on 29 April 1713.), also known as Francis Hawksbee, was an 18th-century English scientist best known for his work on electricity and electrostatic repulsion.
Initially apprenticed in 1678 to his elder brother as a draper, Hauksbee became Isaac Newton’s lab assistant. In 1703 he was appointed curator, instrument maker and experimentalist of the Royal Society by Newton, who had recently become president of the society and wished to resurrect the Royal Society’s weekly demonstrations.
Until 1705, most of these experiments were air pump experiments of a mundane nature, but Hauksbee then turned to investigating the luminosity of mercury which was known to emit a glow under barometric vacuum conditions.
By 1705, Hauksbee had discovered that if he placed a small amount of mercury in the glass of his modified version of Otto von Guericke's generator, evacuated the air from it to create a mild vacuum and rubbed the ball in order to build up a charge, a glow was visible if he placed his hand on the outside of the ball. This glow was bright enough to read by. It seemed to be similar to St. Elmo's Fire. This effect later became the basis of the gas-discharge lamp, which led to neon lighting and mercury vapor lamps. In 1706 he produced an 'Influence machine' to generate this effect. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society the same year.
In 1708, Hauksbee independently discovered Charles' law of gases, which states that, for a given mass of gas at a constant pressure, the volume of the gas is proportional to its temperature.
The Royal Society Hauksbee Awards, awarded in 2010, were given by the Royal Society to the “unsung heroes of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” *Wik
1862 John Edward Campbell (27 May 1862, Lisburn, Ireland – 1 October 1924, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) is remembered for the Campbell-Baker-Hausdorff theorem which gives a formula for multiplication of exponentials in Lie algebras. *SAU His 1903 book, Introductory Treatise on Lie's Theory of Finite Continuous Transformation Groups, popularized the ideas of Sophus Lie among British mathematicians.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1905, and served as President of the London Mathematical Society from 1918 to 1920. *Wik & *Renaissance Mathematicus
1907 Herbert Karl Johannes Seifert (May 27, 1907, Bernstadt – October 1, 1996, Heidelberg) was a German mathematician known for his work in topology. Seifert did other important work related to knot invariants. In 1934 he published results, using surfaces today called Seifert surfaces, which he used to calculate homological knot invariants. Another topic which Seifert worked on was the homeomorphism problem for 3-dimensional closed manifolds. *SAU
DEATHS
1896 Aleksandr Grigorievich Stoletov (August 10, 1839 – May 27, 1896) was a Russian physicist, founder of electrical engineering, and professor in Moscow University. He was the brother of general Nikolai Stoletov. By the end of the 20th century his disciples had headed the chairs of Physics in five out of seven major universities in Russia.His major contributions include pioneer work in the field of ferromagnetism and discovery of the laws and principles of the outer photoelectric effect.*Wik
1928 Arthur Moritz Schönflies (April 17, 1853 – May 27, 1928) worked first on geometry and kinematics but became best known for his work on set theory and crystallography. He classified the 230 space groups in 1891 He studied under Kummer and Weierstrass, and was influenced by Felix Klein.
The Schoenflies problem is to prove that an (n − 1)-sphere in Euclidean n-space bounds a topological ball, however embedded. This question is much more subtle than initially appears. *Wik *SAU
1960 Milton B. Porter Professor at Univ of Texas, he was the dissertation adviser for Goldie Horton, the first woman to get a PhD in Mathematics at Univ of Texas. Eighteen years later he married her. He died in Austin Texas.
1962 FELIX ADALBERT BEHREND (23 April 1911 in Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany -27 May 1962 in Richmond, Victoria, Australia) Felix Behrend's sympathies within pure mathematics were wide, and his creativeness ranged over theory of numbers, algebraic equations, topology, and foundations of analysis. A problem that caught his fancy early and that still occupied him shortly before his death was that of finite models in Euclidean 3-space of the real projective plane. He remained productive for much of the two years of his final illness, and left many unfinished notes in which his work on foundations of analysis is continued. (From his obituary by B H Neumann)
1964 Colin Brian Haselgrove (26 September 1926 – 27 May 1964) In 1958 Haselgrove published his most famous number theory result in A disproof of a conjecture of Pólya. The conjecture of Pólya claims that for every x > 1 there are at least as many numbers less than or equal to x having an odd number of prime factors as there are numbers with an even number of prime factors. R S Lehman and W G Spohn had verified the conjecture for all numbers x up to 800,000 but Haselgrove found a counterexample using methods based on those developed by Ingham with the help of computations carried out on the EDSAC 1 computer at Cambridge. He also verified the calculations using Manchester University's Mark I computer before publishing the results. In the same paper Haselgrove announced that he had also disproved a number theory conjecture of Turán. *SAU
Credits
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell
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