On This Day in Math - August 29

Jeannie at VLA

In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built,
and what one has established, another undoes.
In mathematics alone each generation adds a new storey to the old structure.

~Hermann Hankel

The 242nd day of the year; 242 has six divisors...but 243, 244, and 245 also each has six divisors. 242 is the smallest integer to begin a run of four consecutive integers all of which have the same number of divisors. (What is the smallest integer that begins a run of three consecutive integers with an equal number of divisors?)

242 is not only a palindrome in base ten, it is also a palindrome in base 3 and base 7.  (What palindrome in base ten is also a palindrome in the most other bases 2-9?)

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EVENTS
1609 Galileo writes to his brother in Florence to tell him about his telescope presentation to the Doge on the 24th of August.

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1654 Fermat to Pascal Saturday, August 29, 1654

Monsieur,
Our interchange of blows still continues, and I am well pleased that our thoughts are in such complete adjustment as it seems since they have taken the same direction and followed the same road. Your recent Trait´e du triangle arithmetique and its applications are an authentic proof and if my computations do me no wrong, your eleventh consequence went by post from Paris to Toulouse while my theorem, on figurate numbers, which is virtually the same, was going from Toulouse to Paris. I have not been on watch for failure while I have been at work on the problem and I am persuaded that the true way to escape failure is by concurring with you. But if I should say more, it would he of the nature of a Compliment and we have banished that enemy of sweet and easy conversation. It is now my turn to give you some of my numerical discoveries, but the end of the parliament augments my duties and I hope that out of your goodness you will allow me due and almost necessary respite.

In the same letter he states that, "Meditate however, if you find it convenient, on this theorem: The squared powers of 2 augmented by unity [I.e. 2²ⁿ+1] are always prime numbers. [That is,] The square of 2 augmented by unity makes 5 which is a prime number;The square of the square makes 16 which, when unity is added makes 17, a prime number; The square of 16 makes 256 which, when unity is added, makes 257, a prime number; The square of 256 makes 65536 which, when unity is added, makes 65537, a prime number; and so to infinity. This is a property whose truth I will answer to you. The proof of it is very difficult (impossible, since the statement, as Euler would show later, is not true)and I assure you that I have not yet been able to find it fully." * York University Maths Dept

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1692 For his services to the field of astronomy, Johann Philipp von Wurzelbauer was ennobled in 1692 by Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor and added the von to his name. *Wik

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1831 Michael Faraday discovered electrical induction. *VFR In 1831, Michael Faraday wound a thick iron ring on one side with insulated wire that was connected to a battery. He then wound the opposite side with wire connected to a galvanometer. He found that upon closing the battery circuit, there was a deflection of the galvanometer in the second circuit. Then he was astonished to see the galvanometer needle jump in the opposite direction when the battery circuit was opened. He had discovered that a current was induced in the secondary when a current in the primary was connected and an induced current in the opposite direction when the primary current was disconnected.*TIS

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1899 Dedekind sends a letter to Georg Cantor that includes a proof of the Schroder-Bernstein Theorem (Let A and B be sets. If there is a 1-1 correspondence from A to B and a 1-1 corespondence from B to A, then the sets have the same cardinality.) *Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size By Michael Hallett

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In 1940, Sir Henry Tizard led a mission of leading British and Canadian scientists to the USA to brief official American representatives on devices under active development for war use and to enlist the support of American scientists. Thus began a close cooperation of Anglo-American scientists in such fields as aeronautics and rocketry. His influence probably made the difference between defeat or victory at the Battle of Britain in 1940. *TIS

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1949 the USSR tested their first atomic device, "First Lightning." It was an an implosive type plutonium bomb, detonated at the Semipalatinsk test range, giving up to a 20 kiloton yield. In the U.S. it was calledJoe No. 1 ("Joe" was nickname for Y. Stalin.) This event came five years earlier than anyone in the West had predicted, largely due to one man, the spy Klaus Fuchs. As a Los Alamos physicist, Fuchs had passed detailed blue prints of the original American Trinity bomb design to the Russians. With the emergence of the USSR as a nuclear rival, America's monopoly of atomic weaponry was ended giving the U.S. strong motivation for intensifying its program of nuclear testing. Thus the Cold War was launched.*TIS

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1970 Oscar Morgenstern writes in his diary that Gödel would NOT publish his ontological proof for the existence of God. The first version of the ontological proof in Gödel's papers is dated "around 1941". Gödel is not known to have told anyone about his work on the proof until 1970, when he thought he was dying. In February, he allowed Dana Scott to copy out a version of the proof, which circulated privately. In August 1970, Gödel told Oskar Morgenstern that he was "satisfied" with the proof, but Morgenstern recorded in his diary entry for 29 August 1970, that Gödel would not publish because he was afraid that others might think "that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions (completeness, etc.) correspondingly axiomatized, is possible) *Wik

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1990 The British Computer Misuse Act goes into effect One of the earliest laws anywhere designed to address computer fraud, the Act resulted from a long debate in the 1980s over failed prosecutions of hackers -- in one well-publicized case, two men hacked into a British Telecom computer leaving messages in the Duke of Edinburgh's private mailbox. *CHM

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BIRTHS
1756 Jan Śniadecki (August 29, 1756– November 9, 1830) was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and astronomer at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Born in Żnin, Śniadecki studied at Kraków University and in Paris. He was rector of the Imperial University of Vilnius, a member of the Commission of National Education, and director of astronomical observatories at Kraków and Vilnius. He died at Jašiūnai Manor near Vilnius.
Śniadecki published many works, including his observations on recently discovered planetoids. His O rachunku losów (On the Calculation of Chance, 1817) was a pioneering work in probability. *Wik He is considered as the best Polish mathematician born in the 18th century.

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1876 Charles F. Kettering (29 Aug 1876; 25 Nov 1958) was an American engineer whose 140 patents included the electric starter, car lighting and ignition systems. In his early career, with the National Cash Register Co., Dayton (1904-09), he created the first electric cash register with an electric motor that opened the drawer. When he co-founded the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO, with Edward A. Deeds) he invented the key-operated self-starting motor for the Cadillac (1912) and it spread to nearly all new cars by the 1920's. As vice president and director of research for General Motors Corp. (1920-47) he developed engines, quick-drying lacquer finishes, anti-knock fuels, and variable-speed transmissions.*TIS

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1881 Ferdinand Springer born, The founder of an important publishing house,. Today Springer-Verlag is one of the most important publishers of advanced work on mathematics. *VFR

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1904 Leonard Roth (29 August 1904 Edmonton, London, England – 28 November 1968 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) British Mathematician who worked primarily in Algebraic Geometry. *SAU

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DEATHS
1873 Hermann Hankel (14 February 1839 - 29 August 1873) He studied and worked with, among others, Möbius, Riemann, Weierstrass and Kronecker. His 1867 exposition on complex numbers and quaternions is particularly memorable. For example, Fischbein notes that he solved the problem of products of negative numbers by proving the following theorem: "The only multiplication in R which may be considered as an extension of the usual multiplication in R+ by respecting the law of distributivity to the left and the right is that which conforms to the rule of signs." *Wik

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1930 James Bolam (1839 in Newcastle, England - 29 Aug 1930 in St Helen's, Drumchapel, Dumbartonshire, Scotland) was educated at Newcastle. He became head of the Government Navigation School (later the Leith Nautical College). He was a founder member of the EMS and became an honorary member in 1923. *SAU

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1937 Otto Ludwig Hölder (December 22, 1859 – August 29, 1937) worked on the convergence of Fourier series and in 1884 he discovered the inequality now named after him. He became interested in group theory through Kronecker and Klein and proved the uniqueness of the factor groups in a composition series. *SAU

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1967 Charles Brace Darrow (10 Aug 1889, 29 Aug 1967) was an American inventor who designed the board game Monopoly. He had invented the game on 7 Mar 1933, though it was preceded by other real-estate board games. On 31 Dec 1935, a patent was issued for the game of Monopoly assigned to Parker Brothers, Inc., by Charles Darrow of Pennsylvania (No. 2,026,082). The patent titled it a "Board Game Apparatus" and described it as "intended primarily to provide a game of barter, thus involving trading and bargaining" in which "much of the interest in the game lies in trading and in striking shrewd bargains." Illustrations included with the patent showed not only the playing board and pieces, cards, and the scrip money. *TIS

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1975 Éamon de Valera (14 October 1882, 29 August 1975) was one of the dominant political figures in twentieth century Ireland, serving as head of government of the Irish Free State and head of government and head of state of Ireland. He also introduced the Constitution of Ireland.
De Valera was a leader of Ireland's struggle for independence from Britain in the Irish War of Independence and of the anti-Treaty forces in the ensuing Irish Civil War (1922–23). In 1926, he founded Fianna Fáil and was head of government from 1932–48, 1951–54 and 1957–59 and President of Ireland from 1959–73.
In his youth he had trained as a mathematician and taught mathematics prior to the Easter Rising. Throughout his life he maintained an interest in mathematics and returned to it with a passion in his later life. *Wik

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Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia