It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all,
must be a mathematical science.
~William Jevons
The 226th day of the year; The iteration of the sum of the squares of the digits leads to one (a happy number). What percentage of numbers have this property?
3114 BC The first day of the current Mayan “long count” calendar (adjusted for the Gregorian Calendar). The long count calendar lasts 22,507,528 days and the current calendar will end on December 21 of 2012. What happens then depends on who you read. If the world does NOT end, we will be back to year zero of the Mayan calendar.
1661 , Sir Robert Moray, senior courtier to Charles II, advises Wren that since he did not have time to construct microscope-based drawings that the king had requested, the task was passed to Hooke. This assignment from the king would lead to Hooke's publication of Micrographia in 1665. *Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, pg 62
1727 Charles-Etienne-Louis Camas elected to the French Academy of Sciences because he had earlier won half the prize money in their competition for the best manner of masting vessels. Did Euler get the other half? *VFR
1849 Gauss writes to his former student, Mobius, to thank him for sending a copy of Mobius' paper on third order curves and advises him to investigate the form of analytic curves from Gauss' 1799 dissertation. *Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science
By Guy Waldo Dunnington, Jeremy Gray, Fritz-Egbert Dohse
1898 The first Near Earth Asteroid, 433 Eros was discovered by Carl Gustav Witt *David Dickinson @Astroguyz It was discovered on the same night by Witt in Berlin and Auguste Charlois at Nice. Eros was one of the first asteroids to be visited by a spacecraft, and the first to be orbited and soft-landed on. NASA spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker entered orbit around Eros in 2000, and came to rest on its surface in 2001. On January 31, 2012, Eros passed the Earth at 0.17867 AU (26,729,000 km; 16,608,000 mi), or about 70 times the distance to the Moon. *Wik
1903 the journal Nature reported that helium gas is produced by the radioactive decay of the radium. This key discovery by William Ramsay and Frederick Soddy helped to reveal the structure of atoms. In 1908, Rutherford confirmed that alpha rays and these radium emanations were one and the same: the nuclei of helium atoms, bearing a positive electrical charge. Each were future Nobel laureates in Chemistry. Ramsey won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his discovery of the noble gases. Rutherford was recognized in 1908 for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements. Soddy was honoured in 1921 for his pioneering contributions to understanding the chemical properties of radioactive elements such as radium and uranium.*TIS
1625 Erasmus Bartholin (13 August 1625, Roskilde – 4 November 1698, Kopenhagen)..Bartholin was the editor of van Schooten's "Introduction to the geometry of Descartes", He also discovered double refraction of light using Icelandic Spar crystals. He worked with Ole Roamer in publishing some of Tycho Brahe's observations. His maternal grandfather was Thomas Fincke, the geometer who invented the terms tangent and secant. (*pb)
1704 Alexis Fontaine des Bertins, (13 August 1704 – 21 August 1771) in 1734 he gave a solution of the tautochrone problem which was more general than that given by Huygens, Newton, Euler or Jacob Bernoulli, and in 1737 he gave a solution to an orthogonal trajectories problem. The methods which he developed to solve these problems led to the calculus of variations. He used what he called the "fluxio-differential" method, so called because it used two independent first-order Leibniz type differential operators. This technique was praised by Johann Bernoulli, Euler and d'Alembert. Fontaine then used differential coefficients instead of differentials and Greenberg shows how Fontaine progressed from a calculus of variations to a calculus of several variables. *SAU
1814 Anders Jonas Ångström (13 August 1814, Lögdö, – 21 June 1874) was a Swedish physicist whose pioneering use of spectroscopy is recognised in the name of the angstrom, a unit of length equal to 10-10 meters. In 1853, he studied the spectrum of hydrogen for which Balmer derived a formula. He announced in 1862 that analysis of the solar spectrum showed that hydrogen is present in the Sun's atmosphere. In 1867 he was the first to examine the spectrum of aurora borealis (northern lights). He published his extensive research on the solar spectrum in Recherches sur le spectre solaire (1868), with detailed measurements of more than 1000 spectral lines. He also published works on thermal theory and carried out geomagnetical measurements in different places around Sweden.*TIS
1819 George Gabriel Stokes born. (13 August 1819 – 1 February 1903) (1st Baronet) British mathematical physicist who studied viscous fluids and formulated his law of viscosity for the speed of a solid sphere falling in a fluid. Other laws and mathematical work for which he is known includes Stokes's theorem, in the field of vector analysis. Stokes also worked in optics, the wave theory of light, diffraction (1849), the ultraviolet spectrum and other spectrum analysis. He investigated the nature of fluorescence and was a founder of the field of geodesy with his study of variations in gravity (1849). From 1849 until his death in 1903, he held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (held earlier by Isaac Newton, and more recently by Stephen Hawking). He came from a family with generations of scientists, mathematicians and engineers.*TIS
1861 Cesare Burali-Forti, born(13 August 1861 – 21 January 1931). He discovered the antinomy(paradox) of the class of all ordinals in 1897. He never held a permanent university position for he failed his libera docenze, or license to teach, because of the antagonism to the new methods of vector analysis on the part of some members of the examining committee. *VFR He was an assistant of Giuseppe Peano in Turin from 1894 to 1896, during which time he discovered what came to be called the Burali-Forti paradox of Cantorian set theory. He died in Turin.
1861 Herbert Hall Turner (13 August 1861, Leeds – 20 August 1930, Stockholm) was a British astronomer and seismologist.
He was educated at Clifton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1884 he accepted the post of Chief Assistant at Greenwich Observatory and stayed there for nine years. In 1893 he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Observatory at Oxford University, a post he held for 37 years until his sudden death in 1930.
He was one of the observers in the Eclipse Expeditions of 1886 and 1887. In seismology, he is credited with the discovery of deep focus earthquakes. He is also credited with coining the word parsec.
A few months before Turner's death in 1930, the Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of a new minor planet, and an eleven-year-old Oxford schoolgirl, Venetia Burney, proposed the name Pluto for it to her grandfather Falconer Madan, who was retired from the Bodleian Library Madan passed the name to Turner, who cabled it to colleagues at the Lowell Observatory in the United States. The new minor planet was officially named "Pluto" on 24 March 1930*Wik
1959 Steven Henry Strogatz (August 13, 1959, Torrington, Connecticut - ) is an American mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his work in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and complex network theory.
In particular, his 1998 Nature paper with Duncan Watts, entitled "Collective dynamics of small-world networks", is widely regarded as a seminal contribution to the interdisciplinary field of complex networks, whose applications reach from graph theory and statistical physics to sociology, business, epidemiology, and neuroscience. As one measure of its importance, it was the most highly cited article about networks between 1998 and 2008, and the sixth most highly cited paper in all of physics.
Strogatz's writing includes the 1994 textbook Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, two popular books, and frequent newspaper articles. His most recent book, published in 2009, was The Calculus of Friendship, called "a genuine tearjerker" and "part biography, part autobiography and part off-the-beaten-path guide to calculus". His trade book Sync was chosen as a Best Book of 2003 by Discover Magazine. Strogatz also filmed a series of lectures on chaos theory for the Teaching Company, released in 2008, and, in late January 2010, Strogatz began writing a weekly column on mathematics in The New York Times. These columns, along with many others penned by Strogatz, will appear in a book slated for release in 2012. The New York Times columns have been described as "must reads for entrepreneurs and executives who grasp that mathematics is now the lingua franca of serious business analysis. *Wik
Wessel's paper was published in Danish, and was not circulated in the languages more common to mathematics at that time. It was not until 1895 that his paper came to the attention of the mathematical community, long after the name Argand Diagram had stuck. Incredibly, there were at least three more individuals who may have independently discovered and written on the same idea; Abbe Bruee, C. V. Mourney, and John Warren.
Argand's Book, Essai sur une maniere de representer les quantities imaginaires dans les constructions geometriques, might have suffered the same fate as Wessel except for an unusual chain of events. I give here the version as presented by Michael Crowe in his A History of Vector Analysis
In 1813 J. F. Francais published a short memoir in volume IV of Gergonne's Annales de mathematiques in which Francais presented the geometrical representation of complex numbers. At the conclusion of his paper Francais stated that the fundamental ideas in his paper were not his own, he had found them in a letter written by Legendre to his (Francis') brother who had died. In this letter Legendre discussed the ideas of an unnamed mathematician. Francis added that he hoped this mathematician would make himself known and publish his results.Even with so much interest and attention to the geometry of complex numbers, it was not until Gauss published a short work on the ideas that they became popular.
The unnamed mathematician had in fact already published his ideas, for Legendre's friend was Jean Robert Argand. Hearing of Francais' paper, Argand immediately sent a communication to Gergonne in which he identified himself as the mathematician in Legendre's letter, called attention to his book, summarized its contents, and finally presented an (unsuccessful) attempt to extend his system to three dimensions.
Translations of both Wallis' and Wessel's papers on the imaginaries can be found in A Sourcebook of Mathematics by David Eugene Smith. (*pb)
1882 Logician William Stanley Jevons died (1 September 1835 – 13 August 1882) . He was a British economist and logician.
Irving Fisher described his book The Theory of Political Economy (1871) as beginning the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics as a science concerned with quantities is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna (1871) and by Léon Walras in Switzerland (1874), marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons' contribution to the marginal revolution in economics in the late 19th century established his reputation as a leading political economist and logician of the time. *Wik
1907 Hermann Karl Vogel (April 3, 1841 – August 13, 1907) German astronomer who discovered spectroscopic binaries (double-star systems that are too close for the individual stars to be discerned by any telescope but, through the analysis of their light, have been found to be two individual stars rapidly revolving around one another). He pioneered the study of light from distant stars, and introduced the use of photography in this field.*TIS
1910 Florence Nightingale died; (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910) She is best remembered for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War and her contribution towards the reform of the sanitary conditions in military field hospitals. However, what is less well known about this amazing woman is her love of mathematics, especially statistics, and how this love played an important part in her life's work. *SAU Florence Nightingale had exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age and excelled in the subject under the tutorship of her father. Later, Nightingale became a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics. Among other things she used the pie chart, which had first been developed by William Playfair in 1801. While taken for granted now, it was at the time a relatively novel method of presenting data.
Indeed, Nightingale is described as "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics", and is credited with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram, or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram, in order to illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb", but later that term has frequently been used for the individual diagrams. She made extensive use of coxcombs to present reports on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports.*Wik
1968 Oystein Ore, (7 October 1899 in Oslo, Norway – 13 August 1968 in Oslo) Ore is known for his work in ring theory, Galois connections, and most of all, graph theory. His early work was on algebraic number fields, how to decompose the ideal generated by a prime number into prime ideals. He then worked on noncommutative rings, proving his celebrated theorem on embedding a domain into a division ring. He then examined polynomial rings over skew fields, and attempted to extend his work on factorisation to non-commutative rings.
In 1930 the Collected Works of Richard Dedekind were published in three volumes, jointly edited by Ore and Emmy Noether. He then turned his attention to lattice theory becoming, together with Garrett Birkhoff, one of the two founders of American expertise in the subject. Ore's early work on lattice theory led him to the study of equivalence and closure relations, Galois connections, and finally to graph theory, which occupied him to the end of his life. Ore had a lively interest in the history of mathematics, and was an unusually able author of books for laypeople, such as his biographies of Cardano and Niels Henrik Abel.*Wik
2008 Henri Cartan (July 8, 1904 – August 13, 2008)is known for work in algebraic topology, in particular on cohomology operations, the method of "killing homotopy groups", and group cohomology. His seminar in Paris in the years after 1945 covered ground on several complex variables, sheaf theory, spectral sequences and homological algebra, in a way that deeply influenced Jean-Pierre Serre, Armand Borel, Alexander Grothendieck and Frank Adams, amongst others of the leading lights of the younger generation. The number of his official students was small, but includes Adrien Douady, Roger Godement, Max Karoubi, Jean-Louis Koszul, Jean-Pierre Serre and René Thom.
Cartan also was a founding member of the Bourbaki group and one of its most active participants. His book with Samuel Eilenberg Homological Algebra (1956)[3] was an important text, treating the subject with a moderate level of abstraction and category theory.*Wik
Credits
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell
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