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Gallleo's Notbook with observation of Neptune? |
It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called ‘progress’ to alter our lives without attempting to control it—as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.
~Hyman G. Rickover
The 27th day of the year; 273 = 19,683 which has a digit sum of 27. The sum of the digits of 26^3 also sum to 26. There is no larger number for which the sum of the digits of the cube is equal to the number but there are three smaller examples, can you find them?
In the 3n+1 or Collatz problem, the sequence for n = 27 takes 111 steps (41 steps through odd numbers), climbing to 9232 before descending to 1. The first starting number to exceed this height is 255.
27 is the smallest composite number which cannot be expressed as the sum of two primes.
I think it is nice that when you add the integers from 2 to 7, you get 27.... 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = 27
EVENTS
1520 Off the Patagonian coast near a small peninsula called Punta Tombo, during Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world, a crewman spied strange creatures swimming in the bay. He called them flightless geese, but scientists believe they were penguins of a sort classified as Spheniscus magellanicus.*VFR1613 Galileo observed Neptune, but did not recognize it as a planet. Galileo's drawings show that he first observed Neptune on December 28, 1612, and again on January 27, 1613. On both occasions, Galileo mistook Neptune for a fixed star when it appeared very close—in conjunction—to Jupiter in the night sky; hence, he is not credited with Neptune's discovery. (The official discovery is usually cited as September 23, 1846, Neptune was discovered within 1° of where Le Verrier had predicted it to be.) During the period of his first observation in December 1612, Neptune was stationary in the sky because it had just turned retrograde that very day. This apparent backward motion is created when the orbit of the Earth takes it past an outer planet. Since Neptune was only beginning its yearly retrograde cycle, the motion of the planet was far too slight to be detected with Galileo's small telescope.*Wik A new theory says he may have known it was a planet. Professor David Jamieson, Head of the School of Physics at University of Melbourne is investigating the notebooks of Galileo from 400 years ago and believes that buried in the notations is the evidence that he discovered a new planet that we now know as Neptune. Galileo was observing the moons of Jupiter in the years 1612 and 1613 and recorded his observations in his notebooks. Over several nights he also recorded the position of a nearby star which does not appear in any modern star catalog. "It has been known for several decades that this unknown star was actually the planet Neptune. Computer simulations show the precision of his observations revealing that Neptune would have looked just like a faint star almost exactly where Galileo observed it," Professor Jamieson says.
In one of his notebooks he noticed the movement of a background star (Neptune) on January 28 and a dot (in Neptune's position) drawn in a different ink suggests that he found it on an earlier sketch, drawn on the night of January 6, suggesting a systematic search among his earlier observations. However, any notification about the discovery hasn't been found. *onOrbit.com
1690 Newton returns to Cambridge after spending nearly a year in London serving as an MP from Cambridge University to the Convention Parliament. Declaring the throne vacant after James II escaped to France, the convention offered the throne to William and Mary jointly.According to some reports, his only comments were to complain about a cold draft in the chamber and request that the window be closed
On this day in 1853, De Morgan wrote to Hamilton about the earliest work on the Complex plane
"As to Buée, I agree with Peacock that Buée had no completely formed double algebra, and yet he was the first formal maintainer of the geometrical interpretation of √-1."
Adrien Quentin Buée's memoir, referred to by De Morgan in this quote, was the Mémoire sur les quantités imaginaires was read in 1805 at the Royal Society and was published in 1806. Gert Schubring writes :-
Buée's paper is remarkable in its systematic evaluation of the earlier French discussion on the nature of negative and imaginary quantities. He achieves the establishment of a conceptual connection between the two basic concepts of length or absolute value and of direction which had been separated so systematically in France during the 18th century. Buée's achievements are likewise important for the conceptual development of the negative numbers and for the graphical representation of the complex numbers.
Buée writes in the paper:-
√-1 is therefore not the sign of an arithmetic operation, nor of an arithmetic-geometric operation, but of a purely geometric operation. It is a sign of perpendicularity.
1921, Albert Einstein suggested the possibility of measuring the universe, which startled the audience, with his address Geometry and Expansion given at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Applying certain results of the relativity theory, he came to the conclusion that if the real velocities of the stars (as could be actually measured) were less than the calculated velocities, then it would prove that real gravitations' great distances were smaller than the gravitational distances demanded by the law of Newton. From such divergence, the finiteness of the universe could be proved indirectly, and it would even permit the estimation of its size. *TIS
John Logie Baird FRSE ( 13 August 1888 – 14 June 1946) was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926.He went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated colour television system and the first viable purely electronic colour television picture tube.
In 1928 the Baird Television Development Company achieved the first transatlantic television transmission. Baird's early technological successes and his role in the practical introduction of broadcast television for home entertainment have earned him a prominent place in television's history.
In 2006, Baird was named as one of the 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history, having been listed in the National Library of Scotland's 'Scottish Science Hall of Fame'.
Baird in 1926 with his televisor equipment and dummies "James" and "Stooky Bill" *Wik
1950, Science magazine announced the new antibiotic terramycin. Made by Charles Pfizer & Co., it was isolated from Indiana soil, and found effective against pneumonia, dysentery, and other infections. It was the first pharmaceutical discovered and developed exclusively by Pfizer scientists. This was the result of the company's intensive quest to find new organisms to fight disease. Acting on theories that bacteria-fighting organisms would be found in soil, Pfizer solicited soil samples worldwide, received 135,000 soil samples and conducted more than 20 million tests. Said one of the researchers, “We got soil samples from the bottom of mine shafts... from the bottom of the ocean... from the desert... mountains and in between.” Terramycin® was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on 15 Mar 1950. *TIS
1994 Silicon Graphics Inc. co-founder Jim Clark leaves the company to start Mosaic Communications, the operation that later became Netscape Communications Corp. With Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen, Clark helped popularize the World Wide Web by distributing the company's browser for free.*CHM
2003 Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972 . Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Saturn in 1976 and the orbit of Uranus in 1979. On June 13, 1983, Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet at the time, and so became the first man-made object to leave the proximity of the major planets of the solar system.
2012 An asteroid, 2012 BX34, passed within about 60,000km of Earth - less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon.The asteroid's path made it the closest space-rock to pass by the Earth since June 2011. The asteroid, estimated to be about 11m (36ft) in diameter, was first detected on Jan 25.*BBC website
2016 This is given as the official date of discovery by the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project for the largest known prime number to that date, called M49. The name could change since there may still be smaller Mersenne Primes between this and previously known ones. The previous record was in January of 2013. I am reminded at moments like this of a comment in Barlow's Number Theory (1811) which list all the then known Mersenne Primes up to M31. This number, "is the greatest that will ever be discovered, for, as they are merely curious without being useful it is not likely any person will attempt to find one beyond it." It is strange that we continue the search. It would be terrible if we did not. (Barlow actually listed the Perfect numbers associated with each Mersenne prime.)
[The largest known prime number (as of November 2022) is 282,589,933 − 1, a number which has 24,862,048 digits when written in base 10. See Dec 26, 2017
BIRTHS
1701 Charles-Marie de La Condamine (27 Jan 1701; 4 Feb 1774) French naturalist and mathematician who became particularly interested in geodesy (earth measurement). He was put in charge by the King of France of an expedition to Equador to measure a meridional arc at the equator (1735-43). It was wished to determine whether the Earth was either flattened or elongated at its poles. He then accomplished the first scientific exploration of the Amazon River (1743) on a raft, studying the region, and brought the drug curare to Europe. He also worked on establishment of a universal unit of length, and is credited with developing the idea of vaccination against smallpox, later perfected by Edward Jenner. However, he was almost constantly ill and died in 1773, deaf and completely paralyzed. *TIS |
| *Wik |
1715 Caspar (or Kaspar) Neumann (14 September 1648 – 27 January 1715) was a German professor and clergyman from Breslau with a special interest in mortality rates.
He first did an apprenticeship as a pharmacist. He finished his higher school education at Breslau's Maria-Magdalen grammar school. In 1667 he became a student of theology at the university of Jena, and on Nov. 30, 1673 was ordained as a priest, having been requested as a traveling chaplain for Prince Christian, the son of Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Gotha. On his return home, following a two-year journey through western Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy, and southern France, he became a court-chaplain at Altenburg, and married the daughter of J. J. Rabe, physician in ordinary to the prince of Saxe-Friedenstein. In 1678 he was made the deacon of St. Maria-Magdalen in Breslau and became pastor in 1689. *Wik He was a student of Erhard Weigel
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1829 Isaac Roberts (27 Jan 1829; 17 Jul 1904) British astronomer who was a pioneer in photography of nebulae. In 1885 he had built an observatory with a 20 inch reflector. Using this instrument Roberts was to make considerable progress in the newly developing science of Astro-photography. He photographed numerous celestial objects including Orion Nebula on 15 Jan 1986 (90 minute exposure) and Pleiades. Undoubtedly his finest work was a photograph showing the spiral structure of the Great Nebula in Andromeda, M31 on 29 Dec 1888. In addition to his contribution to astro-photography, Roberts also devised a machine to be used to engrave stellar positions on copper plates, known as the Stellar Pantograver. He was also a geologist of some considerable note.*TIS
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| *Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 49, p.5 |
1831 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pen-name Lewis Carroll (27 Jan 1832, 14 Jan 1898), was an English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, remembered for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel. After graduating from Christ Church College, Oxford in 1854, Dodgson remained there, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises until 1881. As a mathematician, Dodgson was conservative. He was the author of a fair number of mathematics books, for instance A syllabus of plane algebraical geometry (1860). His mathematics books have not proved of enduring importance except Euclid and his modern rivals (1879) which is of historical interest. As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason.*TIS (I once read that if Dodgson had not written "Alice", he would be remembered today for his photography, and if he had not done either of those, then, if he was remembered at all, it would be for his logic book. One of my favorite Lewis Carroll stories is about his gift of a book to Queen Victoria. Here is the version as it is told on the Mathworld page):
Several accounts state that Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson ) sent Queen Victoria a copy of one of his mathematical works, in one account, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. Heath (1974) states, "A well-known story tells how Queen Victoria, charmed by Alice in Wonderland, expressed a desire to receive the author's next work, and was presented, in due course, with a loyally inscribed copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants," while Gattegno (1974) asserts "Queen Victoria, having enjoyed Alice so much, made known her wish to receive the author's other books, and was sent one of Dodgson's mathematical works." However, in Symbolic Logic (1896), Carroll stated, "I take this opportunity of giving what publicity I can to my contradiction of a silly story, which has been going the round of the papers, about my having presented certain books to Her Majesty the Queen. It is so constantly repeated, and is such absolute fiction, that I think it worth while to state, once for all, that it is utterly false in every particular: nothing even resembling it has occurred" (Mikkelson and Mikkelson)And then, I learned that "Lewis Carroll coined 'chortle' in Through the Looking-Glass, in 1871." @OEDonline, Twitter
1861 Ralph Modjeski (born Rudolf Modrzejewski; January 27, 1861 – June 26, 1940) was a Polish-American civil engineer who achieved prominence as "America's greatest bridge builder."
He pioneered the use of suspension bridges and oversaw the design and construction of nearly forty bridges that spanned the great rivers of North America, as well as the development of new rail lines. In addition, he trained succeeding generations of American bridge designers and builders, including Joseph B. Strauss, chief engineer of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge (which was completed six months after Modjeski's San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge).
Modjeski's first project as chief engineer was the railroad bridge across the Mississippi River at Rock Island, Illinois. During his career, he served as chief or consulting engineer on dozens of bridges across the United States.
He took over the mis-designed Quebec Bridge after the 1907 disaster that killed seventy-five workers, and succeeded in creating the longest truss span in the world (though a construction accident killed another thirteen workers). It is still the longest cantilever bridge in the world.
The Benjamin Franklin Bridge, originally named the Delaware River Bridge and known locally as the Ben Franklin Bridge, is a suspension bridge across the Delaware River connecting Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey.
1870 Jules-Émile Verschaffelt (27 January 1870, Ghent – 22 December 1955) was a Belgian physicist. He worked at Kamerlingh Onnes’s laboratory in Leiden from 1894 to 1906 and once again from 1914 to 1923. From 1906 to 1914 he worked at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and from 1923 to 1940 at the Ghent University. *Wik
1885 Franciszek Leja (January 27, 1885 in Grodzisko Górne near Przeworsk – October 11, 1979 in Kraków, Poland) Polish mathematician who greatly influenced Polish Mathematics in the period between the two World Wars.
He was born to a poor peasant family in the southeastern Poland. After graduating from the University of Lwów he was a teacher of mathematics and physics in high schools from 1910 until 1923, among others in Kraków. From 1924 until 1926 he was a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and from 1936 until 1960 in the Jagiellonian University.
During the Second World War he lectured on the underground universities in Łańcut and Lezajsk. But after the German invasion of Poland in 1939 life there became extremely difficult. There was a strategy by the Germans to wipe out the intellectual life of Poland. To achieve this Germans sent many academics to concentration camps and murdered others. In one of such actions he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which he fortunately survived.
Since 1948 he worked for the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was a co-founder of the Polish Mathematics Society in 1919 and from 1963 until 1965 the chairman. Since 1931 he was a member of the Warsaw Science Society (TNW).
His main scientific interests concentrated on analytic functions, in particular the method of extremal points and transfinite diameters. *Wik
1889 Balthasar van der Pol (27 January 1889 – 6 October 1959) was a Dutch physicist.
Van der Pol began his studies of physics in Utrecht in 1911. J. A. Fleming offered van der Pol the use of the Pender Electrical Laboratory at University College for a study of the heuristics of wireless reception on board ships. In England he also worked with J. J. Thomson. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Balthasar worked with Hendrik Lorentz at Teylers Stichting. For his thesis he wrote The effect of an ionised gas on electro-magnetic wave propagation and its application to radio, as demonstrated by glow-discharge measurement under the supervision of Willem Henri Julius. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1920. He joined Philips Research Laboratories in 1921, where he worked until his retirement in 1949.
As observed by Hendrik Casimir, "Radio might have remained a field of haphazard empiricism along with wild commercial ventures, but for the influence of men like van der Pol who stressed the need for a more scientific approach."
The differential equations of coupled electrical systems drew his interest, and he developed the idea of "relaxation oscillations". With J. van der Mark he applied the idea to the heartbeat, which provided one of the earliest quantitative models of the action potential. These studies led him to the van der Pol equation and Oliver Heaviside’s operational calculus for dealing with differential equations. He submitted articles to Philosophical Magazine on the operational calculus and, in coordination with H. Bremmer, wrote Modern Operational Calculus based on the Two-sided Laplace Integral, published by Cambridge University Press.
He was awarded the Institute of Radio Engineers (now the IEEE) Medal of Honor in 1935. The asteroid 10443 van der Pol was named after him.
Van der Pol became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949. *Wik
1900 Hyman George Rickover (27 Jan 1900; 8 Jul 1986) was a Polish-American naval officer who immigrated to the US (1906) and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1922. He eventually became an Admiral. He is known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy” for his leadership to build the atomic-powered submarine, USS Nautilus (1954). He served on active duty with the United States Navy for more than 63 years, receiving exemptions from the mandatory retirement age due to his critical service in the building of the United States Navy's nuclear surface and submarine force. *TIS
1903 Howard Percy Robertson (27 Jan 1903 in Hoquiam, Washington, USA - 26 Aug 1961) made outstanding contributions to differential geometry, quantum theory, the theory of general relativity, and cosmology. He was interested in the foundations of physical theories, differential geometry, the theory of continuous groups, and group representations. He was particularly interested in the application of the latter three subjects to physical problems.
His contributions to differential geometry came in papers such as: The absolute differential calculus of a non-Pythagorean non-Riemannian space (1924); Transformation of Einstein space (1925); Dynamical space-times which contain a conformal Euclidean 3-space (1927); Note on projective coordinates (1928); (with H Weyl) On a problem in the theory of groups arising in the foundations of differential geometry (1929); Hypertensors (1930); and Groups of motion in space admitting absolute parallelism (1932). *SAU
1936 Samuel C.C. Ting(27 Jan 1936, ) Samuel Chao Chung Ting is an American physicist who shared, with Burton Richter, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976 for his discovery of a new subatomic particle, the J/psi particle.*TIS
1941 Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley (27 January 1941 – 23 March 1981) was a British-born New Zealand astronomer and cosmologist whose research made fundamental contributions to the astronomical understanding of how galaxies evolve, grow and die.
Tinsley completed pioneering theoretical studies of how populations of stars age and affect the observable qualities of galaxies. She also collaborated on basic research into models investigating whether the universe is closed or open. Her galaxy models led to the first approximation of what protogalaxies should look like.
In 1974 she received the American Astronomical Society's Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy, awarded for "outstanding research and promise for future research by a postdoctoral woman researcher", in recognition of her work on galaxy evolution.
In 1977, Tinsley, with Richard Larson of Yale, organized a conference on 'The Evolution of Galaxies and Stellar Populations'.
Shortly after, in 1978, she became the first female professor of astronomy at Yale University. Her last scientific paper, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal ten days before her death, was published posthumously that November, without revision. *Wik
DEATHS
1667 Gregorius Saint Vincent (8 Sept 1584 in Bruges, Belgium - 27 Jan 1667 in Ghent, Belgium). His Opus geometricum (1647) contains the most beautiful frontispiece of any mathematics text. In this work, Gregorius was the first to develop the theory of the geometric series and also the first to show that the area under a hyperbola is a logarithm. *VFR (in the frontispiece he claims to have squared the circle) The engraved frontispiece shows sunrays inscribed in a square frame being arranged by graceful angels to produce a circle on the ground: 'mutat quadrata rotundis'. There was uneasiness in the learned world because no one in that world still believed that under the specific Greek rules the quadrature of a circle could possibly be effected, and few relished the thought of trying to locate an error, or errors, in 1200 pages of text. Four years later, in 1651, Christiaan Huygens found a serious defect in the last book of 'Opus geometricum', namely in Proposition 39 of Book X, on page 1121. This gave the book a bad reputation.*SAUBob Mrotek wrote to point out that "The picture shows an angel holding a square frame and the light ray that passes through it forms a circle on the ground. This is ALWAYS the case no matter what the shape of the hole that the light passes through as long as there is enough focal length between the hole (depending on its size) and the ground. When you walk in the woods you will notice that the light passing through the odd shaped spaces between the leaves forms perfect circles on the ground. This is the camera obscura effect and most people never realize it."
1860 János Bolyai (15 Dec 1802; 27 Jan 1860) Hungarian mathematician and one of the founders of non-Euclidean geometry - geometry that does not include Euclid's axiom that only one line can be drawn parallel to a given line through a point not on the given line. His father, Farkas Bolyai, had devoted his life to trying to prove Euclid's famous parallel postulate. Despite his father's warnings that it would ruin his health and peace of mind, János followed in working on this axiom until, in about 1820, he came to the conclusion that it could not be proved. He went on to develop a consistent geometry (published 1882) in which the parallel postulate is not used, thus establishing the independence of this axiom from the others. He also did valuable work in the theory of complex numbers. *TIS
He once accepted a challenge to duel thirteen of his fellow cavalry officers on the condition that after each duel he would serenade the loser with a piece on his violin. He won all thirteen duels.
János had his own funeral card printed with a blank date and built his own coffin. Still alive six years later, he printed a new funeral card to replace the unused one. In his will he left instructions that an apple tree be planted on his grave in remembrance of Eve, Paris, and Newton. In 1911 his ashes were exhumed and laid into his father’s tomb. *robertnowlan
1860 Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, Baronet (23 Jul 1773, 27 Jan 1860) British soldier and astronomical observer for whom the city of Brisbane, Australia, is named. He was Governor of NSW (1821-25). Mainly remembered as a patron of science, he built an astronomical observatory at Parramatta, Australia, made the first extensive observations of the southern stars since Lacaille in (1751-52) and built a combined observatory and magnetic station at Makerstoun, Roxburghshire, Scotland. He also conducted (largely unsuccessful) experiments in growing Virginian tobacco, Georgian cotton, Brazilian coffee and New Zealand flax.*TIS
1895 James Cockle (14 Jan 1819 in Great Oakley, Essex, England - 27 Jan 1895 in Bayswater, London, England) Cockle was remarkably productive as a mathematician publishing over 100 papers. He wrote papers on both pure and applied mathematics, as well as on the history of science. On the former topic he wrote on fluid dynamics and magnetism. Most of his work, however, was in pure mathematics where he studied algebra, the theory of equations, and differential equations. He had a collaborator on mathematical work, a Congregationalist minister named Robert Harley. *SAU
1947 Alexander Brown (5 May 1877 in Dalkeith, near Edinburgh, Scotland - 27 Jan 1947 in Cape Town, South Africa) In 1903 Brown was appointed as Professor of Applied Mathematics in the South African College. In 1911 he married Mary Graham; they had a son and a daughter. He remained in Cape Town until his death in 1947, but his status changed in 1918 when the South African College became the University of Cape Town.
He was a member of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, joining the Society in December 1898. He contributed papers to meetings of the Society such as On the Ratio of Incommensurables in Geometry to the meeting on Friday 9 June 1905 and Relation between the distances of a point from three vertices of a regular polygon, at the meeting on Friday 11 June 1909, communicated by D C McIntosh.
Brown was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa in 1918, was on its Council from 1931 to 1935 and again in 1941, was its Honorary Treasurer from 1936 to 1940, and President from 1942 to 1945. Alexander Brown was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 20 May 1907. *SAU
1965 Philip Franklin (October 5, 1898 in New York — January 27, 1965 in Belmont, Massachusetts) was an American mathematician and professor whose work was primarily focused in analysis.
His dissertation, The Four Color Problem, was supervised by Oswald Veblen. After teaching for one year at Princeton and two years at Harvard (as the Benjamin Peirce Instructor), Franklin joined the MIT Department of Mathematics, where he stayed until his 1964 retirement.
In 1922, Franklin gave the first proof that all planar graphs with at most 25 vertices can be four-colored.
In 1928, Franklin gave the first description of an orthonormal basis for L²([0,1]) consisting of continuous functions (now known as "Franklin's system").
In 1934, Franklin published a counterexample to the Heawood conjecture, this 12-vertex cubic graph is now known as the Franklin graph.
He was married to Norbert Wiener's sister Constance. *Wik
1972 Richard Courant (8 Jan 1888, 27 Jan 1972) German-American mathematician who, upon joining the faculty of New York University in 1934, began to build the nucleus of a small research group based on the Göttingen model he had experienced as a student of David Hilbert in Germany. Courant's published papers were in variational problems, finite difference methods, minimal surfaces, and partial differential equations. He encouraged the publication of mathematical texts and high quality monographs, such as Methods of Mathematical Physics by Courant and Hilbert. His leadership was commemorated in 1964 when the institute he founded was named the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University *TIS He died at age 84 of a stroke in New Rochelle, NY. Today it is named after him: The Courant Institute. *VFR
1995 Raphael Mitchel Robinson (November 2, 1911 – January 27, 1995) was an American mathematician.
In 1941, Robinson married his former student Julia Bowman. She became his Berkeley colleague and the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society.
He worked on mathematical logic, set theory, geometry, number theory, and combinatorics. Robinson (1937) set out a simpler and more conventional version of John Von Neumann's 1923 axiomatic set theory. Soon after Alfred Tarski joined Berkeley's mathematics department in 1942, Robinson began to do major work on the foundations of mathematics, building on Tarski's concept of "essential undecidability," by proving a number of mathematical theories undecidable. Robinson (1950) proved that an essentially undecidable theory need not have an infinite number of axioms by coming up with a counterexample Robinson's work on undecidability culminated in his coauthoring Tarski et al. (1953), which established, among other things, the undecidability of group theory, lattice theory, abstract projective geometry, and closure algebras.
Robinson worked in number theory, even employing very early computers to obtain results. For example, he coded the Lucas-Lehmer primality test to determine whether 2n − 1 was prime for all prime n less than 2304 on a SWAC. In 1952, he showed that these Mersenne numbers were all composite except for 17 values of n = 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 61, 89, 107, 127, 521, 607, 1279, 2203, 2281. He discovered the last 5 of these Mersenne primes, the largest ones known at the time.
Robinson wrote several papers on tilings of the plane, in particular a clear and remarkable 1971 paper "Undecidability and nonperiodicity for tilings of the plane" simplifying what had been a tangled theory.*Wik
2001 Robert Alexander Rankin (27 Oct 1915 in Garlieston, Wigtownshire, Scotland - 27 Jan 2001 in Glasgow, Scotland) At Cambridge Rankin began to undertake research in number theory on the difference between two successive primes which won him the Rayleigh Prize in 1939. He published four papers on The difference between consecutive prime numbers between this time and 1950. in 1939 he began to work with G H Hardy on the results of Ramanujan. Although Ramanujan had died nearly twenty years earlier, he had left a number of unpublished notebooks filled with theorems that Hardy and other mathematicians continued to study.
After an interruption during WWII, Rankin wrote over 100 research papers, mostly on the theory of numbers and the theory of functions. He wrote The modular group and its subgroups published in 1969 and Modular forms and functions which was published in 1977. The former of these is described by Rankin himself in the Preface, "This short course of lectures was given at the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics, in the University of Madras, in September 1968. The object of the course was to study the modular group and some of its subgroups, with help of algebraic rather than analytic or topological methods." He made a number of remarkable contributions to the theory of numbers have played a major part in the modern development of the topic. *SAU
2008 Irene Anne Stegun (February 9, 1919 – January 27, 2008) was a mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards who, with Milton Abramowitz, edited a classic book of mathematical tables called A Handbook of Mathematical Functions, widely known as Abramowitz and Stegun. When Abramowitz died of a heart attack in 1958, Stegun took over management of the project and finished the work by 1964, working under the direction of the NBS Chief of Numerical Analysis Philip J. Davis, who was also a contributor to the book. *Wik
2015 Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educator. Townes was known for his work on the theory and application of the maser, on which he got the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics connected with both maser and laser devices. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov.
In a career that spanned six decades, Dr. Townes developed radar bombing systems and navigation devices during World War II, advised presidents and government commissions on lunar landings and the MX missile system, verified Einstein’s cosmological theories, discovered ammonia molecules at the center of the Milky Way, and created an atomic clock that measured time to within one second in 300 years. He died at the age of 99 in Berkeley, California*Wik *NY Times
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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