If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.
~Max Born
The fifth day of the year; five is the number of Platonic Solids. Five is also the smallest number of queens needed to attack every square on a standard chess board. (can you demonstrate such a board ?)
The sum of the first five integers raised to their own power, is prime, (and so is the sum of the first six)
One of math's perplexing mysteries. A sphere in five dimensional space has a larger volume (8pi^2/15) than in any other dimension for a unit radius. From two dimensions up to five the volume increases, then decreases forever after.
In 1845, Gabriel Lame proved a remarkable theorem involving the number 5. "The number of steps (i.e., divisions) in an application of the Euclidean algorithm never exceeds 5 times the number of (decimal) digits in the lesser." Donald Knuth (1969) extended this to show that, this was related to the Fibonacci numbers (and ).
and from Jim Wilder : 1084 is the smallest integer whose spelling, one thousand eighty-four, contains the 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) in order.
Gustav Dirichlet was a German mathematician who at the age of 20 proved that Fermat’s Last Theorem has no solution for n=5. The cases for n=3, 4 had already been handled by Euler and Fermat himself. Later on he also proved that there is no solution for the case n=14.
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| *Fermat's Library |
There are exactly 5 triangles with integer side lengths whose perimeters and areas (disregarding units) are equal.
More Math Facts for every Year Day here.
1665 The first volume of the Journal des Savants appeared in Paris. The Journal des sçavans (later renamed Journal des savants), founded by Denis de Sallo, was the earliest academic journal published in Europe, that from the beginning also carried a proportion of material that would not now be considered scientific, such as obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. The first edition appeared as a twelve page quarto pamphlet on Monday, 5 January 1665. This was shortly before the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, on 6 March 1665.
More Math Facts for every Year Day here.
EVENTS
1665 The first volume of the Journal des Savants appeared in Paris. The Journal des sçavans (later renamed Journal des savants), founded by Denis de Sallo, was the earliest academic journal published in Europe, that from the beginning also carried a proportion of material that would not now be considered scientific, such as obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. The first edition appeared as a twelve page quarto pamphlet on Monday, 5 January 1665. This was shortly before the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, on 6 March 1665.
Ole Rømer's determination of the speed of light was published in the journal, which established that light did not propagate instantly. It came to about 26% slower than the actual value.
*Wik
1769 On January 5, 1769, James Watt finally received the patent for his steam engine: patent 913 A method of lessening the consumption of steam in steam engines-the separate condenser. *yovisto
A preserved Watt beam engine at Loughborough University *Wik
1853 "First derivative" first used as a noun in English in "On the General Law of the Transformation of Energy" by William John Macquorn Rankine, a paper read before the Philosophical Society of Glasgow.
MacTutor has "
"FIRST DERIVATIVE, SECOND DERIVATIVE, etc. Christian Kramp (1760-1826) used the terms premiére dérivée and seconde dérivée (first derivative and second derivative) (Cajori vol. 2, page 67). The terms appear in his élémens d'arithmétique universelle (1808).
The DSB implies Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) introduced these terms in his Théorie des fonctions. It would seem, however, that he uses phrases that would be translated "first derived function" and "third derived function," etc. [James A. Landau]
First derivative is found in English in 1838 in Mathematical Treatises, Containing I. The Theory of Analytical Functions II Spherical Trigonometry, with Practical and Nautical Astronomy.
page 9: In which series, fx is the primitive, and f'x, f''x, f'''x, &c. its derivative functions; f'x being the first derivative or prime function, f''x the second derivative, &c. ....
1874 In a letter to Dedekind, Cantor asks if the points in a square can be put in one-to-one correspondence with those on a line. “Methinks that answering this question would be no easy job, despite the fact that the answer seems so clearly to be ‘no’ that proof appears almost unnecessary.” It was three years before Cantor could prove the answer was “yes”. *VFR
In 1896, an Austrian newspaper, Wiener Presse, published the first public account of a discovery by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, the form of radiation that became known as X-rays.*TIS
Röntgen was awarded an honorary Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Würzburg after his discovery.
First medical X-ray by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig's hand
1900 Minkowski responds to Hilbert who had asked his opinion about several potential topics for Hilbert's address at the Second International Conference of Mathematicians in Paris, in the summer. Minkowski responds that, "Most alluring would be the attempt at a look into the future and a listing of the problems on which mathematicians should try themselves during the coming century. With such a lecture you could have people talking about your lecture decades later." *Reid, Hilbert, pg 69
Hilbert's would follow his advice and eventually publish 23 problems . They were all unsolved at the time, and several proved to be very influential for 20th-century mathematics. Hilbert presented ten of the problems (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 19, 21, and 22) at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking on August 8 at the Sorbonne.
1900 On this day Max Planck presented his theoretical explanation involving quanta of energy at a meeting of the Physikalische Gesellschaft in Berlin. In doing so he had to reject his belief that the second law of thermodynamics was an absolute law of nature, and accept Boltzmann's interpretation that it was a statistical law.
the famous Planck black-body radiation law, which described clearly the experimentally observed black-body spectrum. It was first proposed in a meeting of the DPG on 19 October 1900 and published in 1901. (This first derivation did not include energy quantisation, and did not use statistical mechanics, to which he held an aversion.) In November 1900 Planck revised this first version, now relying on Boltzmann's statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics as a way of gaining a more fundamental understanding of the principles behind his radiation law. Planck was deeply suspicious of the philosophical and physical implications of such an interpretation of Boltzmann's approach; thus his recourse to them was, as he later put it, "an act of despair ... I was ready to sacrifice any of my previous convictions about physics".*Wik
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1902 In a letter to his mother, Earnest Rutherford writes, “I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in this road of investigation are Becquerel and the Curies... “ — 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson Ernest Rutherford * Quoted in A. S. Eve, Rutherford: Being the Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Lord Rutherford (1939), 80.
1962 The first reference to Simula in writing is made. This early object-oriented language was written by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-John Dahl of the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo. Simula grouped data and instructions into blocks called objects, each representing one facet of a system intended for simulation. *CHM
1974 The famous grasshopper weathervane atop Faneuil Hall in Boston was found to be missing on this date.It had been removed by thieves, but later recovered. When a weather vane was fashioned for this famous trading hall of colonial Boston, the grasshopper was chosen as it appears on the crest of Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of England’s Royal Exchange. He also founded the earliest professorship of mathematics in Great Britain, the chair in Geometry at Gresham College London.*VFR Gresham created the Royal Exchange in London in 1571. It was destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666. Like Faneuil Hall, it had a grasshopper on its weather vane as well. When the modern London exchange was built, a giant golden grasshopper is on top of it as well. Several other locations have grasshopper symbols of one kind or another, like the stone carving marking the location of Garraway's coffee house, and a hanging sign on Lombard St where a goldsmith owned by Gresham was located.
The grasshopper vane on Faneul Hall was designed and built by Shem Drowne, a metalsmith from Maine who came to Boston late in the 17th Century. Three of Drowne's vanes are still in us, one on the Old North Church were famously used to signal the British mode of attack, a rooster on a vane in Cambridge, and the vane still atop Faneul Hall, after it was found wrapped in rags in the belfry where the thieves had left it.
There is even a financial Gresham's Law that is summarized as "bad money drives out good money". Gresham, more formally stated it as, "'When by legal enactment a government assigns the same nominal value to two or more forms of circulating medium whose intrinsic values differ, payments will always, as far as possible, be made in that medium of which the cost of production is least, the more valuable medium tending to disappear from circulation,"
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| Faneuil Hall weather vane *Wik |
The Logo of Gresham College has just been restyled, but still has the grasshopper atop, ready to spring into action.
BIRTHS
“Madame Lepaute computed for this book a table of numbers of oscillations for pendulums of different lengths, or the lengths for each given number of vibrations, from that of 18 lignes, that does 18000 vibrations per hour, up to that of 3000 leagues.”
Following her work with Lalande on Comet Halley, she again collaborated with him on the ephemeris for the 1761 Transit of Venus. She also collaborated with Lalande for fifteen years on the calculations for the Connaissance des temps. In 1762 she calculated the exact time for a solar eclipse that occurred on 1 April 1764. She also wrote an article on the eclipse with an eclipse map. She produced star catalogues and calculated an ephemeris of the sun, moon and the planets from 1774 to 1784. Although childless she adopted and trained he husband nephew, Joseph Lepaute Dagelet (175116788) in astronomy and mathematics. He went on to become professor of mathematics at the French Military School and later deputy astronomer at the French Academy of Science, where he had a distinguished career. A comet and a crater on the moon are named in her honour.
This post taken entirely from a longer article by Thony Christie.
1838 Camille Jordan (5 Jan 1838; 20 Jan 1922) French mathematician and engineer who prepared a foundation for group theory and built on the prior work of Évariste Galois (died 1832). As a mathematician, Jordan's interests were diverse, covering topics throughout the aspects of mathematics being studied in his era. The topics in his published works include finite groups, linear and multilinear algebra, the theory of numbers, topology of polyhedra, differential equations, and mechanics. *TIS
He is remembered now by name in a number of results:
The Jordan curve theorem, a topological result required in complex analysis
The Jordan normal form and the Jordan matrix in linear algebra
In mathematical analysis, Jordan measure (or Jordan content) is an area measure that predates measure theory
In group theory, the Jordan–Hölder theorem on composit *Wikion series is a basic result.
Jordan's theorem on finite linear groups
1871 Federigo Enriques born in Leghorn, Italy. In 1907 he and Severi received the Bordin Prize from the Paris Academy for their work on hyperelliptical surfaces. *VFR Now known principally as the first to give a classification of algebraic surfaces in birational geometry, and other contributions in algebraic geometry.*SAU
1884 Arnaud Denjoy ( 5 January 1884, 21 January 1974) was a French mathematician. Denjoy was born in Auch, Gers. His contributions include work in harmonic analysis and differential equations. His integral was the first to be able to integrate all derivatives. Among his students is Gustave Choquet.Denjoy died in Paris in 1974.*Wik
1909 Stephen Cole Kleene (5 Jan 1909; 25 Jan 1994) American mathematician and logician whose research was on the theory of algorithms and recursive functions. He developed the field of recursion theory with Church, Gödel, Turing and others. He contributed to mathematical Intuitionism which had been founded by Brouwer. His work on recursion theory helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. By providing methods of determining which problems are soluble, Kleene's work led to the study of which functions can be computed. *TIS
DEATHS
1951 Joseph Fels Ritt (August 23, 1893–January 5, 1951) was an American mathematician at Columbia University in the early 20th century.
He is known for his work on characterizing the indefinite integrals that can be solved in closed form, for his work on the theory of ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations, for beginning the study of differential algebraic groups, and for the method of characteristic sets used in the solution of systems of polynomial equations.*Wik
1970 Max Born (11 Dec 1882, 5 Jan 1970) German physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 (with Walther Bothe), for his statistical formulation of the behavior of subatomic particles. Born's studies of the wave function led to the replacement of the original quantum theory, which regarded electrons as particles, with a mathematical description.*TIS (I was not aware until Thony Christie advised me that his granddaughter is Grammy winner Olivia Newton-John)
If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.
~Max Born
1971 Columbus O'D Iselin (25 Sept 1904, 5 Jan 1971) Columbus O'D(onnell) Iselin was an American oceanographer, born in New Rochelle, N.Y. As director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1940-50; 1956-57) in Massachusetts, he expanded its facilities 10-fold and made it one of the largest research establishments of its kind in the world. He developed the bathythermograph and other deep-sea instruments responsible for saving ships during World War II. He made major contributions to research on ocean salinity and temperature, acoustics, and the oceanography of the Gulf Stream. *TIS
1987 Josif Zakharovich Shtokalo (16 Nov 1897 in Skomorokhy, Sokal, Galicia (now Ukraine) - 5 Jan 1987 in Kiev, Ukraine) Shtokalo worked mainly in the areas of differential equations, operational calculus and the history of mathematics. Shtokalo's work had a particular impact on linear ordinary differential equations with almost periodic and quasi-periodic solutions. He extended the applications of the operational method to linear ordinary differential equations with variable coefficients.
He is regarded as one of the founders of the history of Soviet mathematics and particularly of the history in Ukraine and articles about M Ostrogradski and H Voronoy, he edited the three volume collections of Voronoy's (1952-3) and Ostrogradski's works (1959-61), a Russian-Ukrainian mathematical dictionary (1960) and approximately eighteen other Russian-Ukrainian terminology dictionaries. *SAU
1994 Sir David Robert Bates, FRS(18 November 1916, Omagh, County Tyrone, Ireland – 5 January 1994) was an Irish mathematician and physicist.
During the Second World War he worked at the Admiralty Mining Establishment where he developed methods of protecting ships from magnetically activated mines.
His contributions to science include seminal works on atmospheric physics, molecular physics and the chemistry of interstellar clouds. He was knighted in 1978 for his services to science, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and vice-president of the Royal Irish Academy. In 1970 he won the Hughes Medal. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.
The Mathematics Building at Queens University Belfast, is named after him. *Wik
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| *SAU |
1928 Bernard Malgrange (6 July 1928 – 5 January 2024) was a French mathematician who worked on differential equations and singularity theory. He proved the Ehrenpreis–Malgrange theorem and the Malgrange preparation theorem, essential for the classification theorem of the elementary catastrophes of René Thom.
He received his Ph.D. from Université Henri Poincaré in 1955. His advisor was Laurent Schwartz. He was elected to the Académie des sciences in 1988.
In 2012 he gave the Łojasiewicz Lecture (on "Differential algebraic groups") at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Malgrange died on 5 January 2024, at the age of 95.
2018 John Watts Young (September 24, 1930 – January 5, 2018) astronaut who was the commander of the first ever Space Shuttle mission (STS-1, 12 Apr 1981), walked on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission (21 Apr 1972), made the first manned flight of the Gemini spacecraft with Virgil Grissom. *TIS
He is the only astronaut to fly on four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo command and service module, the Apollo Lunar Module and the Space Shuttle.
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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