OOPS...
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning,
or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. 1895
And in a Letter to Baden-Powell (1896) Radio has no future.
I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning,
or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. 1895
And in a Letter to Baden-Powell (1896) Radio has no future.
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
The 183rd day of the year; the concatenation of 183 and 184, 183184 is a perfect square. There are no smaller numbers for which the concatenation of two consecutive numbers is square. (Students might seek the next such pair of numbers. They are small enough to be year dates)
The sum of the first 183 primes minus 183 is prime.
183 is the difference of two squares, 32^2 - 29^2, and of course, like every odd number, it is the difference of the squares ot the consecutive numbers that sum to 183, 92^2-91^2= 183
Lagrange proved that every integer is the sum of four or less non-zero squares. 183 is one of the unusual ones that require four. It is the 29th number that requires the full set of three squares. \(183 = 13^2 + 3^2 + 2^2 + 1^1.\)
183 is the eighth of the 12 year-days which are perfect totient numbers. (There are only 57 such numbers under 103). A list of the perfect totient numbers seems to suggest that all of them are multiples of three, but then you get to 4375, the smallest perfect totient number that is not divisible by 3.[a perfect totient number is a number that is the sum of it's iterated totients, that is, the number of integers smaller than, and relatively prime to 183 + the number smaller than and less than that result, + ... down to one, "For example, start with 327. Then φ(327) = 216, φ(216) = 72, φ(72) = 24, φ(24) = 8, φ(8) = 4, φ(4) = 2, φ(2) = 1, and 216 + 72 + 24 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 327 " *Wik
Get more Math Facts for every year date here
In 1698 Thomas Savery was issued British Letters Patent No.356 for what he called "The Miner's Friend; or an engine to raise water by fire" which was the first application of steam power for pumping water. The steam powered pump had no piston. Two years earlier Savery was issued British Letters Patent No.347 for his invention for "Navigation improved; or the art of rowing ships of all rates in calms with a more easy, swift, and steady motion than oars can." ( which involved paddle-wheels driven by a capstan and which was dismissed by the Admiralty following a negative report by the Surveyor of the Navy,Edmund Dummer.)*TIS*Wik
1779 One of the earliest mentions of blackboards in Colonial America was in a letter from John Taylor, a tutor at Queens College (to become Rutgers University)to a graduate student, John Bogart, that he was asking to take over his classes while Taylor was away on military duties. "I have spoken to Mr. Briton to make a blackboard.." *Kidwell, Hastings, & Roberts; Tools of American Mathematics Teaching.
Lagrange proved that every integer is the sum of four or less non-zero squares. 183 is one of the unusual ones that require four. It is the 29th number that requires the full set of three squares. \(183 = 13^2 + 3^2 + 2^2 + 1^1.\)
183 is the eighth of the 12 year-days which are perfect totient numbers. (There are only 57 such numbers under 103). A list of the perfect totient numbers seems to suggest that all of them are multiples of three, but then you get to 4375, the smallest perfect totient number that is not divisible by 3.[a perfect totient number is a number that is the sum of it's iterated totients, that is, the number of integers smaller than, and relatively prime to 183 + the number smaller than and less than that result, + ... down to one, "For example, start with 327. Then φ(327) = 216, φ(216) = 72, φ(72) = 24, φ(24) = 8, φ(8) = 4, φ(4) = 2, φ(2) = 1, and 216 + 72 + 24 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 327 " *Wik
Get more Math Facts for every year date here
EVENTS
1133 First trade security agreement between Pisans and Alibibn Yusof of Morocco.Under such an agreement, Guilielmo, father of Leonardo brought his young son (who would much later be called Fibonacci) to Bugia, where he would learn of the Arabic calculation system that he would introduce to his homeland in his Liber Abbaci in 1202. *Devlin, The Man of Numbers
1779 One of the earliest mentions of blackboards in Colonial America was in a letter from John Taylor, a tutor at Queens College (to become Rutgers University)to a graduate student, John Bogart, that he was asking to take over his classes while Taylor was away on military duties. "I have spoken to Mr. Briton to make a blackboard.." *Kidwell, Hastings, & Roberts; Tools of American Mathematics Teaching.
1832 Legendre writes to Nathanial Bowditch regarding his translation of LaPlace's "Mecanique Celeste" ,"Your work is not merely a translation with a commentary; I regard it as a new edition, augmented and improved, and such a one as might have come from the hands of the author himself, ... if he had been solicitously studious of being clear." LaPlace's classic is a very difficult book, and Biot, who helped him prepare it for printing said that Laplace himself would frequently get lost in following his own line of reasoning and insert, "il est aise a voir" (It is easy to see). *The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States, F. Cajori
1850 Stokes’s theorem made its first appearance as a postscript to a letter from Sir William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) to Stokes. It first appeared publicly as question 8 on the Smith’s Prize exam for 1854. Stokes drew up this competitive exam, which was taken by the best mathematics students at Cambridge University. By the time Stokes died the theorem was universally known as “Stokes’s theorem.” [Spivak, Calculus on Manifolds, p. viii].
1865 Sylvia Ann Howland died in 1865, leaving roughly half her fortune of some 2 million dollars (equivalent to $31,291,000 in 2016) to various legatees, with the residue to be held in trust for the benefit of Hetty Robinson, Howland's niece. The remaining principal was to be distributed to various beneficiaries on Robinson's death.
Robinson produced an earlier will, leaving her the whole estate outright. To the will was attached a second and separate page, putatively seeking to invalidate any subsequent wills. Howland's executor, Thomas Mandell, rejected Robinson's claim, insisting that the second page was a forgery, and Robinson sued.
In the ensuing case of Robinson v. Mandell, Charles Sanders Peirce testified that he had made pairwise comparisons of 42 examples of Howland's signature, overlaying them and counting the number of downstrokes that overlapped. Each signature featured 30 downstrokes and he concluded that, on average, 6 of the 30 overlapped, 1 in 5. Benjamin Peirce showed that the number of overlapping downstrokes between two signatures also closely followed the binomial distribution, the expected distribution if each downstroke was an independent event. When the admittedly genuine signature on the first page of the contested will was compared with that on the second, all 30 downstrokes coincided, suggesting that the second signature was a tracing of the first.
Benjamin Peirce, Charles' father, then took the stand and asserted that, given the independence of each downstroke, the probability that all 30 downstrokes should coincide in two genuine signatures was
\(\frac {1}{2.666* 10^{21}}/) *wik
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| C S Peirce |
1866 Alfred Russell Wallace writes to Darwin with to suggest a name change for his basic principal of Evolution:
I wish.. to suggest ... adopting Spencer's term, (which he generally uses in preference to Natural Selection, viz, "Survival of the Fittest"*Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders, pg 29
1883 Helmholtz writes to Heinrich Hertz to congratulate him on his investigations. "I have read with the greatest interest your investigation on the cathode ray discharge, and cannot refrain from writing to say Bravo!" Hemholtz was not given to token praise, and was the opinion that was most valued by Hertz. *Hertz Miscellaneous Papers
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| Cathode Ray Tube or Crookes Tube |
1897 – Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi obtains a patent for radio in London.*Wik
1944 Grace Hopper meets Howard Aiken for the first time. Here is her description of the meeting:
Until 1944, I had been a thoroughly respectable mathematician. I had never met a digit, and I wanted nothing to do with digits. I came into the computer business in a unique fashion. I was ordered to the Navy Liaison Officer at Harvard. I left Midshipmen School on Friday, and on Monday morning, 2nd July 1944, I reported to the Navy Liaison Officer, Harvard. He took me by the hand, and led me over to an underground laboratory. I had just acquired one-and-a-half stripes. There stood a large object, with three stripes, who took one look at me and said: "Where the hell have you been?" I spluttered, and said that I had had two days' travel time. He said: "For the last three months." I said: "Midshipmen's School", and he said he had told them it was not necessary. By this time I was practically cowering, of course, but with one-and-a-half stripes, I would stand up straight and listen to three stripes. He waved his hand and said: "That's a computing machine." I said, "Yes, Sir." What else could I say? He said he would like to have me compute the coefficients of the arc tangent series, for Thursday. Again, what could I say? "Yes, Sir." I did not know what on earth was happening, but that was my meeting with Howard Hathaway Aiken. In the long run, he taught me one very important thing. One can always make a mistake once, but it must not be made a second time. That was a very good thing to learn. He also flatly informed me that he had told the Bureau of Naval Personnel not to send him a female. At this point, and over the next few months, I learned another lesson. I could have taken the attitude of showing him, and making him take that back. Instead, I decided it would be far better to learn to work with him. This is a lesson we all need to learn: of not showing people, but learning to work with people. It certainly made a difference in getting things done in the computer field.*SAU
1971 On this day in 1971, the first meeting of the British Society for the History of Mathematics took place at Thames Polytechnic [now the University of Greenwich].
1982 Science (p. 39) reported that Steven Smale had proved that the average-case behavior of the simplex algorithm for linear programming is far better than the worse-case behavior, which is exponential. [Mathematics Magazine 56 (1983), p. 55]. *VFR
1992 On July 2, fearing for the impact that a park service removal of homeowners around Elkmont, Tennessee in the Great Smokey Mountain Natl Park would have on a variety of local fireflys, Lynn Faust wrote a letter to Professor Steven Stogratz, who had recently written a paper in Science Magazine about synchronized flashing of the firelies (lightning bugs) known to exist in Southeast Asia. Ms. Faust's letter would, in Strogatz's words, "shatter a (scientific) myth that had lasted for decades."
2011 Simon Chua, 58, received Australia's B. H. Neumann Award for pioneering efforts in training and honing the talent of young Filipino mathematicians for the past 15 years.
The Australian Mathematics Trust (AMT) bestowed the award to Chua on July 2, 2011. The B. H. Neumann Awards are presented annually for "important contributions over many years to the enrichment of mathematics learning in Australia and its region," according to the AMT.
The award is named in honor of Bernhard H. Neumann, the so-called father of Australian mathematics, who “provided outstanding leadership, support and encouragement for mathematics and the teaching of mathematics at all levels."
Chua, who is president and co-founder of the Mathematics Trainers Guild-Philippines (MTG), is the first Asian to receive the award.
Through the MTG, Filipino students have won numerous medals in math competitions abroad including in China, United States, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and Indonesia.
In 2006, Chua became the first Filipino to win the Paul Erdos Award from the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions. *MathDL
Simon Chua receives his Erdös Award from WFNMC President Peter Kenderov at Robinson College, Cambridge on 22 July 2006.
BIRTHS
1622 Rene-Francoise de Sluse (2 July 1622 – 19 March 1685) Sluse contributed to the development of calculus and this work focuses upon spirals, tangents, turning points and points of inflection. He and Johannes Hudde found algebraic algorithms for finding tangents, minima and maxima that were later utilized by Isaac Newton. These algorithms greatly improved upon the complicated algebraic methods of Pierre de Fermat and René Descartes, who themselves had improved upon Roberval's kinematic, but geometric, non-algorithmic methods of determining tangents. Augustus De Morgan has the following to say about de Sluse's contribution to Newton's method of fluxions in his discussion of the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy.
1842 George Thom (2 July 1842 in Forgue near Huntly, Scotland - 20 Dec 1916 in Aberdeen, Scotland) graduated from Aberdeen and then became Principal of Doveton College in Madras, India. He returned to Scotland as Vice-Principal of Chanonry School Aberdeen and then became Rector of Dollar Institution (later to become Dollar Academy). He held this post for 24 years. He was a founder member of the EMS and became the fifth President in 1886. *SAU
1847 Andrew Gray graduated from Glasgow University and was appointed assistant and secretary to Lord Kelvin. He became Professor of Physics at University College Bangor and then returned to Glasgow as Kelvin's successor. He produced many books and papers in both mathematics and physics.*SAU
1852 William Burnside, whose Theory of Groups (1897, 1911) is now a classic. His suspicion that every group of odd order is solvable was proved in 1962 by Walter Feit and John G. Thompson. *VFR He is known mostly as an early contributor to the theory of finite groups. In 1897 Burnside's classic work Theory of Groups of Finite Order was published. The second edition (published in 1911) was for many decades the standard work in the field. A major difference between the editions was the inclusion of character theory in the second.
Burnside is also remembered for the formulation of Burnside's problem (which concerns the question of bounding the size of a group if there are fixed bounds both on the order of all of its elements and the number of elements needed to generate it) and for Burnside's lemma (a formula relating the number of orbits of a permutation group acting on a set with the number of fixed points of each of its elements) though the latter had been discovered earlier and independently by Frobenius and Cauchy.
1862 Sir William Henry Bragg (2 July 1862 – 10 March 1942) was a pioneer British scientist in solid-state physics who was a joint winner (with his son Sir Lawrence Bragg) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for research on the determination of crystal structures. During the WW I, Bragg was put in charge of research on the detection and measurement of underwater sounds in connection with the location of submarines. He also constructed an X-ray spectrometer for measuring the wavelengths of X-rays. In the 1920s, while director of the Royal Institution in London, he initiated X-ray diffraction studies of organic molecules. Bragg was knighted in 1920. *TIS
2011 Simon Chua, 58, received Australia's B. H. Neumann Award for pioneering efforts in training and honing the talent of young Filipino mathematicians for the past 15 years.
The Australian Mathematics Trust (AMT) bestowed the award to Chua on July 2, 2011. The B. H. Neumann Awards are presented annually for "important contributions over many years to the enrichment of mathematics learning in Australia and its region," according to the AMT.
The award is named in honor of Bernhard H. Neumann, the so-called father of Australian mathematics, who “provided outstanding leadership, support and encouragement for mathematics and the teaching of mathematics at all levels."
Chua, who is president and co-founder of the Mathematics Trainers Guild-Philippines (MTG), is the first Asian to receive the award.
Through the MTG, Filipino students have won numerous medals in math competitions abroad including in China, United States, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and Indonesia.
In 2006, Chua became the first Filipino to win the Paul Erdos Award from the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions. *MathDL
Simon Chua receives his Erdös Award from WFNMC President Peter Kenderov at Robinson College, Cambridge on 22 July 2006.
1622 Rene-Francoise de Sluse (2 July 1622 – 19 March 1685) Sluse contributed to the development of calculus and this work focuses upon spirals, tangents, turning points and points of inflection. He and Johannes Hudde found algebraic algorithms for finding tangents, minima and maxima that were later utilized by Isaac Newton. These algorithms greatly improved upon the complicated algebraic methods of Pierre de Fermat and René Descartes, who themselves had improved upon Roberval's kinematic, but geometric, non-algorithmic methods of determining tangents. Augustus De Morgan has the following to say about de Sluse's contribution to Newton's method of fluxions in his discussion of the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy.
When they state that Collins had been four years in circulating the letter in which the method of fluxions was sufficiently described to any intelligent person, they suppress two facts: first, that the letter itself was in consequence of Newton's learning that Sluse had a method of tangents; secondly, that it revealed no more than Sluse had done. ...this method of Sluse is never allowed to appear ...Sluse wrote an account of the method which he had previously signified to Collins, for the Royal Society, for whom it was printed. The rule is precisely that of Newton... To have given this would have shown the world that the grand communication which was asserted to have been sent to Leibniz in June 1676 might have been seen in print, and learned from Sluse, at any time in the previous years: accordingly it was buried under reference. ...Leibniz had seen Hudde at Amsterdam, and had found that Hudde was in possession of even more than SluseHe corresponded with the mathematicians and intellectuals of the day; his correspondents included Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, John Wallis, and Michelangelo Ricci. He was appointed Chancellor of Liege and Counsellor and Chancellor to Prince Maximilian-Henry of Bavaria. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1674. *Wik
1842 George Thom (2 July 1842 in Forgue near Huntly, Scotland - 20 Dec 1916 in Aberdeen, Scotland) graduated from Aberdeen and then became Principal of Doveton College in Madras, India. He returned to Scotland as Vice-Principal of Chanonry School Aberdeen and then became Rector of Dollar Institution (later to become Dollar Academy). He held this post for 24 years. He was a founder member of the EMS and became the fifth President in 1886. *SAU
1847 Andrew Gray graduated from Glasgow University and was appointed assistant and secretary to Lord Kelvin. He became Professor of Physics at University College Bangor and then returned to Glasgow as Kelvin's successor. He produced many books and papers in both mathematics and physics.*SAU
1852 William Burnside, whose Theory of Groups (1897, 1911) is now a classic. His suspicion that every group of odd order is solvable was proved in 1962 by Walter Feit and John G. Thompson. *VFR He is known mostly as an early contributor to the theory of finite groups. In 1897 Burnside's classic work Theory of Groups of Finite Order was published. The second edition (published in 1911) was for many decades the standard work in the field. A major difference between the editions was the inclusion of character theory in the second.
Burnside is also remembered for the formulation of Burnside's problem (which concerns the question of bounding the size of a group if there are fixed bounds both on the order of all of its elements and the number of elements needed to generate it) and for Burnside's lemma (a formula relating the number of orbits of a permutation group acting on a set with the number of fixed points of each of its elements) though the latter had been discovered earlier and independently by Frobenius and Cauchy.
1862 Sir William Henry Bragg (2 July 1862 – 10 March 1942) was a pioneer British scientist in solid-state physics who was a joint winner (with his son Sir Lawrence Bragg) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for research on the determination of crystal structures. During the WW I, Bragg was put in charge of research on the detection and measurement of underwater sounds in connection with the location of submarines. He also constructed an X-ray spectrometer for measuring the wavelengths of X-rays. In the 1920s, while director of the Royal Institution in London, he initiated X-ray diffraction studies of organic molecules. Bragg was knighted in 1920. *TIS
1876 Harriet Brooks, born July 2, 1876 in Exeter, Ontario, enjoyed the distinction of being the first graduate student to work with Ernest Rutherford, a giant (both physically and intellectually) of early atomic physics. They enjoyed a happy, productive period of collaboration until their lives diverged in dramatically different directions.
Harriet Brooks was the third of nine children born to Elizabeth Worden and George Brooks, a commercial traveler for a flour company. The family’s move to Montreal in 1894 proved fortunate for Harriet, who attended McGill University on scholarships and graduated with honors in mathematics and natural philosophy in 1898. That same summer, Rutherford arrived at McGill as a 28-year-old physics professor fired up about radioactivity.
Together, Brooks and Rutherford studied what he called “radium emanation.” Their joint paper, published in 1901 in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, identified this mysterious substance as a heavier-than-air gas.
The new gas appeared to be another new radioactive element, though they dared not label it as such. At the time, no respectable scientist would boast of turning one element into another – a claim that smacked of alchemy. As the pace of discovery and understanding accelerated, however, “emanation” indeed proved to be a new addition to the periodic table: the element radon.
In pursuit of a doctoral degree (not then offered by McGill), Harriet Brooks continued her research as a Fellow in Physics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Again she distinguished herself, winning the Bryn Mawr President’s Fellowship for graduate study in Europe. Rutherford intervened to place her with his own mentor, J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish, where she spent the 1902-1903 academic year. Then, instead of returning to Bryn Mawr to complete her studies, she returned to McGill, to Rutherford. Here she made a startling discovery that she reported in a letter to Nature in 1904: In addition to releasing a gas, radium also ejected radioactive atoms that could accumulate on a non-radioactive surface.
This phenomenon, now known as radioactive recoil, was reported with excitement four years later by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn. Rutherford told them right away that Harriet Brooks had seen the same thing well beforehand, and Hahn eventually credited her as the first observer when he wrote his autobiography.
Most likely following her heart, Harriet Brooks left McGill in 1905 to teach physics at Barnard College, the women’s part of Columbia University, where she was reunited with Bergen Davis, a fellow physicist she’d met at the Cavendish. In the summer of 1906, when she informed officials at the college of her engagement to Davis, they requested her resignation.
She stood up to the dean, claiming “a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries.” That said, she broke up with Davis and spent the following year as an independent researcher at the Curie lab in Paris.
Marie Curie had assumed directorship of the lab at the Sorbonne following her husband’s death in April 1906. She was pleased with Brooks, her first hire, and invited the talented young scientist to stay on for at least another year. Brooks chose instead to rejoin Rutherford, who had moved to the University of Manchester. Eager to welcome her again, Rutherford supported Brooks’s fellowship application with a sterling letter of recommendation, in which he insisted that “next to Mme. Curie she is the most prominent woman physicist in the department of radioactivity.”
Midway through these arrangements, marriage to an old flame from McGill took Harriet Brooks back to Montreal. As wife of physics instructor Frank Pitcher and mother of three children, she pursued no further study of radioactivity, though she helped other female researchers win scholarships through her involvement with the Canadian Federation of University Women. The Pitchers lost their son Charles to meningitis at age fourteen. They were stricken again when their eighteen-year-old daughter, Barbara, went missing between classes at McGill in March 1929 and was found weeks later, drowned.
Harriet Brooks died on April 17, 1933, after a lingering but undisclosed illness. She was 56 years old. Rutherford submitted a formal obituary notice to Nature describing her important contributions. He expressed his personal loss in a letter to a colleague:
“She was a woman of great personal charm as well as of marked intellectual interests. I am afraid her domestic life was not without serious trials which she bore with astonishing fortitude. My wife and I held her in great affection and her premature death is a grievous blow to us.”
*Linda Hall Library Org
Ernest Rutherford’s research group in Montreal, 1899. Harriet Brooks is at center rear; Rutherford is at far right (aip.org)
1885 Émile Henriot (2 July 1885 - 1 February 1961) was a French chemist notable for being the first to show definitely that potassium and rubidium are naturally radioactive.
He investigated methods to generate extremely high angular velocities, and found that suitably placed air-jets can be used to spin tops at very high speeds - this technique was later used to construct ultracentrifuges.
He was a pioneer in the study of the electron microscope. He also studied birefringence and molecular vibrations.
He obtained his DSc in physics in 1912 the Sorbonne, Paris, under Marie Curie. *Wik
1906 Hans Bethe, (July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) German-born American theoretical physicist who helped to shape classical physics into quantum physics and increased the understanding of the atomic processes responsible for the properties of matter and of the forces governing the structures of atomic nuclei. Bethe did work relating to armour penetration and the theory of shock waves of a projectile moving through air. He studied nuclear reactions and reaction cross sections (1935-38). In 1943, Oppenheimer asked Bethe to be the head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. After returning to Cornell University in 1946, Bethe became a leader promoting the social responsibility of science. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics (1967) for his work on the production of energy in stars. *TIS
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| Bethe in 1967 *wik |
1591 Vincenzo Galilei ( c. 1520 – 2 July 1591) Italian, music theorist, lutenist and composer, who as the father of Galileo Galilei, adopted experimentation to prove aspects of acoustics, and may thus have influenced his son, Galileo, away from pure, abstract mathematics and towards making experiments and investigation. Vincenzo's discoveries in acoustics included some of the physics of vibrating strings and columns of air. In particular he was the first to show that the ratio of an interval was proportional to string lengths but varied as the square of the tension applied to the strings and as the cubes of volumes of air. He recognized the superiority of equal tempered tuning and compiled a codex of pieces illustrating the use of all 24 major and minor keys as early as 1584.*TIS
1613 Bartholomeo Pitiscus (August 24, 1561 – July 2, 1613) was a Polish theologian who first coined the word Trigonometry. *SAU Pitiscus achieved fame with his influential work written in Latin, called Trigonometria: sive de solutione triangulorum tractatus brevis et perspicuus (1595, first edition printed in Heidelberg), which introduced the word "trigonometry" to the English and French languages, translations of which had appeared in 1614 and 1619, respectively. It consists of five books on plane and spherical trigonometry. Pitiscus is sometimes credited with inventing the decimal point, the symbol separating integers from decimal fractions, which appears in his trigonometrical tables and was subsequently accepted by John Napier in his logarithmic papers (1614 and 1619).*Wik
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| Front Cover of the 1612 edition of Trigonometriæ sive de dimensione triangulorum libri quinque. |
1621 Thomas Harriot (Oxford, c. 1560 – London, 2 July 1621) died of a cancerous ulcer on his left nostril. While in America in 1586 he learned to “drink” tobacco smoke from the Indians. This probably makes him the earliest recorded tobacco fatality. He is best known for his contributions to algebra, including the invention of the symbol for less than, \( \lt \) and greater than, \( \gt \) . He might have adopted this symbol from a decoration on an Indian’s back. See C. L. Smith, “On the origin of ‘<’ and ‘>’,” The Mathematics Teacher, 57(1964), 479–481 for a picture of this Indian.*VFR
He also is credited with the mathematical symbol for "therefore" \(\therefore \) His executors posthumously published his Artis Analyticae Praxis on algebra in 1631; Nathaniel Torporley was the intended executor of Harriot's wishes, but Walter Warner in the end pulled the book into shape. It may be a compendium of some of his works but does not represent all that he left unpublished (more than 400 sheets of annotated writing). It isn't directed in a way that follows the manuscripts and it fails to give the full significance of Harriot's writings.*Wik He introduced a simplified notation for algebra and his fundamental research on the theory of equations was far ahead of its time. He was able to solve equations, even with negative or complex roots. However, he published no mathematical work in his lifetime. (Artes analyticae praxis, posthumous, 1631). Especially early in his career, he worked on navigation for his patron Walter Raleigh. Harriot carried out extensive telescopic observations of the satellites of Jupiter and of sunspots. When investigating optics, he discovered the sine law and measured the refractive indices of 13 different substances. He investigated free motion and motion resisted in air, and ballistic curves.*TIS Thomas Harriot was an English mathematician who did outstanding work on the solution of equations, recognising negative roots and complex roots in a way that makes his solutions look almost like a present day solution.*SAU
The solution of quadratic equations by the method of factoring was often referred to as Harriot's method because of his introduction of the method in his writing.
It is not possible today to find Harriot's grave. Although he was buried near the altar of St Christopher le Stocks in London,the church was destroyed in the great fire of 1666. There is a plaque in the entrance hall of the Bank of England, which is close to the site of Harriot's grave. It reproduces the original Latin wording of his epitaph.(p474) An English translation would read:
Stay, traveler, lightly tread;
Near this spot lies all that was mortal
Of that most celebrated man Thomas Harriot.
He was that most learned Harriot . . .
Who cultivated all the sciences and excelled in all . . .
A most studious searcher after truth . . .
1874 Gouverneur Emerson American physician, statistician and agriculturalist who prepared a series of tables of deaths and causes in Philadelphia, during thirty years from 1807. These showed, for example, the excessive mortality of males during childhood. He began practice in Philadelphia on 4 Aug 1820, where yellow fever broke out a few weeks later, with 73 deaths by that fall. Emerson recorded cases, dates, locations, and outcomes. He concluded no current medical treatments was especially effective. When smallpox reappeared there, with 325 deaths in 1824, Emerson drafted a bill for control measures. There were only 6 cases of smallpox in the city in 1825, and 3 in 1826. In retirement, he turned to peach culture, and studied phosphate and guano fertilizers. *TIS
1947 Nikolai Grigorievich Chebotaryov (15 June [O.S. 3 June] 1894 – 2 July 1947) proved his density theorem generalising Dirichlet's theorem on primes in an arithmetical progression*SAU
1963 Seth Barnes Nicholson (November 12, 1891 – July 2, 1963) was an American astronomer best known for discovering four satellites of Jupiter. As a graduate student at the University of California, while photographing the recently- discovered 8th moon of Jupiter with the 36-inch Crossley reflector, he discovered a 9th (1914). During his life career at Mt.Wilson Observatory, he discovered two more Jovian satellites (1938) and the 12th (1951), as well as a Trojan asteroid, and computed orbits of several comets and of Pluto. His main assignment at Mt. Wilson was observing the sun with the 150-foot solar tower telescope, and he produced annual reports on sunspot activity and magnetism for decades. With Edison Pettit, he measured the temperatures of the moon, planets, sunspots, and stars in the early 1920s. *TIS
2002 Daniel Chonghan Hong (3 Mar 1956; 2 Jul 2002 at age 46) Korean theoretical physicist specializing in statistical physics and nonlinear dynamic physics, who with colleague Hugo Caram, originated the void diffusing-void model of granular flow, which is recognized as an effective theoretical treatment for a broad range of dynamical phenomena in granular media. In general, his work ranged from percolation network, viscous fingering, granular flows to traffic equations. He studied and taught in America from 1981, and wrote articles for popular magazines on various topics. He died at the young age of 46 of cardiac arrest. *TIS
2016 Rudolf Emil Kálmán (May 19, 1930 – July 2, 2016) is a Hungarian-American electrical engineer, mathematical system theorist, and college professor, who was educated in the United States, and has done most of his work there. He is currently a retired professor from three different institutes of technology and universities. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a mathematical formulation that is widely used in control systems, avionics, and outer space manned and unmanned vehicles. For this work, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Kálmán with the National Medal of Science on October 7, 2009. *Wik
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
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell
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