It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.
~Albert Einstein
The 108th day of the year; 108 can be written as the sum of a cube and a square (a^3 + b^2) in two ways. This is the smallest number with this property. *Prime Curios
AND 108 = 1¹ • 2² • 3³ *jim wilder @wilderlab
The concatenation of 108 with its previous and next number is prime, i.e., 108107 and 108109 are primes.
108 is the smallest possible sum for a set of six distinct primes such that the sum of any five is prime: {5, 7, 11, 19, 29, 37}. (Don't just sit there, there must be another that is larger. Find it.
Today and tomorrow are both examples of ambinumerals, numbers which form a different number when rotated 180o 108 becomes 801. Numerals like 181 which stay the same when rotated are called strobogrammatic numerals
EVENTS
1557 Maurolico completed the first volume of his Arithmetic at three o’clock in the morning on Easter Sunday. [Jean Cassinet, Mathematics from Manuscript to Print, 1300–1600, p. 162; Thanks to Dave Kullman]*VFR Throughout his lifetime, he made contributions to the fields of geometry, optics, conics, mechanics, music, and astronomy. He edited the works of classical authors including Archimedes, Apollonius, Autolycus, Theodosius and Serenus. He also composed his own unique treatises on mathematics and mathematical science.
His Arithmeticorum libri duo (1575) includes the first known proof by mathematical induction. (Yea!)
His De Sphaera Liber Unus (1575) contains a fierce attack against Copernicus' heliocentrism, in which Maurolico writes that Copernicus "deserved a whip or a scourge rather than a refutation". (Boo!)
His unpublished manuscript Compaginationes solidorum regularium (1537) includes a statement of Euler's formula V-E + F = 2 for the Platonic solids, long before Leonhard Euler formulated it more generally for convex polyhedra in 1752.
Maurolico's astronomical observations include a sighting of the supernova that appeared in Cassiopeia in 1572. Tycho Brahe published details of his observations in 1574; the supernova is now known as Tycho's Supernova. *Wik
Star map of the constellation Cassiopeia showing the position (labelled I) of the supernova of 1572; from Tycho Brahe's De nova stella
1694 An ad for William Leybourne's Pleasure with Profit appears in The Proceedings of the Old Bailey:
Pleasure with Profit: Consisting of Recreations of divers kinds, viz. Numerical, Geometrical, Mathematical, Astronomical, Arithmetical, Cryptographical, Magnetical, Authentical, Chymical, and Historical. Published to Recreate Ingenious Spirit, and to induce them to make further scrutiny how these (and the like) Sublime Sciences. And to divert them from following such Vices, to which Youth (in this Age) are so much inclin'd. By William Laybourn, Philomathes.
A nice discussion of the "Uphill Climber", one of the problems in the book, is explained by the excellent mathematical writer, Julian Havel. *http://plus.maths.org
1775 Paul Revere’s Ride. The revolutionary War began the next day. Now you probably think this has nothing to do with mathematics, but how do you suppose he got that lantern up in the church steeple? Easy, he used a key to get in. Since he was a change ringer, a highly mathematical activity, he needed a key to get up to the bells. *VFR
Revere was not in the church himself that night, and two families claim credit for their ancestor being the actual hanger of the lights. A plaque in the Old North Church (by his ancestors) credits Robert Newman, a Sexton of the church who probably had a key himself. (Maybe less math than we thought) And don't be fooled by the SEXton to think it is related to six, it is from the same root as sacred. PB
1796 Professor E. A. W. Zimmerman sends a short notice of Gauss’s work on constructibility of regular polygons (see March 30, 1796) to the Jenenser Intelligenzblatt. He adds, “It is worthy of notice that Herr Gauss is now in his 18th year and has devoted himself here in Brunswick to philosophy and classical literature with just as great success as to higher mathematics.” [Tietze, 204] *VFR (found this on Twitter from Matt Henderson....and loved it..
"Erdős believed God had a book of all perfect mathematical proofs.
God believes Gauss has such a book.")
1810 Gauss elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. *VFR
1831 Founding of the University of the City of New York. [Muller] *VFR
1831, Sophie Germain wrote a letter to her friend Libri which describes Galois' situation.
"... the death of M. Fourier, have been too much for this student Galois who, in spite of his impertinence, showed signs of a clever disposition. All this has done so much that he has been expelled form École Normale. He is without money ... They say he will go completely mad. I fear this is true."
Galois then took Cauchy's advice and submitted a new article On the condition that an equation be soluble by radicals in February 1830. The paper was sent to Fourier, the secretary of the Paris Academy, to be considered for the Grand Prize in mathematics. Fourier died in April 1830 and Galois' paper was never subsequently found and so never considered for the prize.
By 31 May, Galois was dead.
1853 Ana Roqué de Duprey (Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, April 18, 1853 - Río Piedras ,Puerto Rico October 5, 1933) was a writer , educator , activist for women's rights and one of the founders of the University of Puerto Rich . In addition, she is considered one of the precursors of feminism in Puerto Rico , and founded the Puerto Rican Women's League in 1917 , the first organization attached to this movement in that country.
Her mother died when she was only four years old and she was raised by her father, her aunt, and her grandmother, all of whom were educators. In 1860, when she was seven years old, she was sent to a regular school, and two years later she graduated. She left school and dedicated herself to sewing with her grandmother, Ana María Tapia de Roque, who had also been a teacher, and continuing arithmetic with her father. She continued her education at home and in 1864, at the age of eleven, she became the youngest teaching assistant in Puerto Rico. In 1866, at age thirteen, she founded a school in her home. She also wrote a student text on geography , which was later adopted by the Puerto Rico Department of Education. She applied for her teaching license and passed the exams.
In 1884, she was offered a position as a teacher in Arecibo which she accepted. Additionally, she enrolled in the Provincial Institute where she studied philosophy and science , and she obtained her bachelor's degree . In 1894 she founded the magazine La Mujer , which became the first publication to have a Puerto Rican woman as editor.
She was also the founder of La Evolución (1902), La Mujer del Siglo XX (1907), Album Puertorriqueño (1918) and Heraldo de la Mujer (1920). In 1899, she was appointed director of the San Juan Normal School.
She was passionate about astronomy ; she would be named an honorary member of the Society of Astronomers of France.
Roqué was, along with Isabel Andreu de Aguilar (1887-1948) and Mercedes Sola (1879-1923), a renowned feminist activist. In 1917, she founded the Liga Femínea de Puerto Rico, the first organization of its kind in that country that was dedicated to issues related to women's rights ; Some of their assemblies were held in San Juan , Ponce , and Arecibo , and one of their first actions was to send a request for women's suffrage to the legislature. In 1924, she founded the Puerto Rican Association of Women Suffragettes, which became one of the most powerful organizations in her fight to establish women's right to vote, a task that became a reality in 1932 and entered into force for all women in 1935.
1881, The Natural History Museum in London @NHM_London was opened for the public. It is one of the largest natural history museum‘s of the world.* @SCIHIBLOG
1905 The first mention of the word genetics seems to occur in a letter from William Bateson to Adam Sedgwick.
First page of a 1905 letter written by William Bateson, first Director of the John Innes Institute, to Adam Sedgewick, Cambridge professor. The transcription of the letter is the following: 'Dear Sedgewick, if the Quick fund were used for the foundation of a Professorship relating to Heredity and Variation the best title would I think, be 'The quick professorship of the study of heredity.' No single word in common use quite gives this meaning. Such a word is badly wanted, and if it were desirable to coin one, 'Genetics' might do. Either expression clearly …' Published with permission from the Bateson estate. Courtesy of the Cambridge University Library.
1942 GE builds first US Jet Aircraft Engine: In1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps picked GE's Lynn, Massachusetts, plant to build a jet engine based on the design of Britain's Sir Frank Whittle. Six months later, on April 18, 1942, GE engineers successfully ran the I-A engine.
In October 1942, at Muroc Dry Lake, California, (today, Edwards Air Force Base) two I-A engines powered the historic first flight of a Bell XP-59A Airacomet aircraft, launching the United States into the Jet Age. *About GE website
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| Bell P-59B Airacomet |
1958 On his 100th birthday India issued a stamp commemorating the centenary of the birth of Dr. Dhondo Keshav Karve (1858–1922), pioneer of women’s education. [Scott #299]*VFR
Popularly known as Maharshi Karve, he was a social reformer in India in the field of women's welfare. He advocated widow remarriage and he himself married a widow. Karve was a pioneer in promoting widows' education. He founded the first women's university in India - SNDT Women's University .The Government of India awarded him with the highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, in 1958, the year of his 100th birthday.He organized a conference against the practice of devdasi. He started 'Anath balikashram' an orphanage for girls. His intention was to give education to all women and make them stand on their own feet. Through his efforts, the first women university was set up in 20th century.
The appellation Maharshi, which the Indian public often assigned to Karve, means "a great sage".
1986 IBM First to Use Megabit Chip:
Newspapers report that IBM had become the first computer manufacturer to use a megabit chip -- a memory chip capable of storing 1 million bits of information -- in a commercial product, its Model 3090. The announcement is heralded as a notable triumph for American computer makers, whose work had been perceived as having fallen behind that of the Japanese electronics industry.*CHM
'This is a signal of our semiconductor technology leadership,'' said Jack D. Kuehler, the I.B.M. senior vice president who heads all of the company's manufacturing operations. And the chip itself, he quickly added, comes not from a fabrication laboratory in a Tokyo suburb, but from I.B.M.'s own semiconductor operations in Essex Junction, Vt.
But industry analysts say the victory may be more symbolic than substantive. Dozens of American manufacturers have fled the commodity memory chip business, unable to match Japan's remarkable manufacturing efficiencies or constant price cutting. Japan Has 85% of the Market
IBM 3090
2011 Scientists demonstrate mathematically that asymmetrical materials should be possible; such material would allow most light or sound waves through in one direction, while preventing them from doing so in the opposite direction; such materials would allow the construction of true one-way mirrors, soundproof rooms, or even quantum computers that use light to perform calculations. *Wik
BIRTHS
1772 David Ricardo (18 April 1772 – 11 September 1823) was an English political economist, often credited with systematizing economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator, who amassed a considerable personal fortune. Perhaps his most important contribution was the law of comparative advantage, a fundamental argument in favor of free trade among countries and of specialization among individuals. Ricardo argued that there is mutual benefit from trade (or exchange) even if one party (e.g. resource-rich country, highly skilled artisan) is more productive in every possible area than its trading counterpart (e.g. resource-poor country, unskilled laborer), as long as each concentrates on the activities where it has a relative productivity advantage. *Wik
1838 Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran (18 April 1838 – 28 May 1912) French chemist who developed improved spectroscopic methods which had recently been developed by Kirchhoff. In 1859, he set out to scan minerals for unknown spectral lines. Fifteen years of persistence paid off when he discovered the elements gallium (1875), samarium (1880), and dysprosium (1886). He ranks with Robert Bunsen, Gustav Kirchhoff and William Crookes as one of the founders of the science of spectroscopy. Guided by the general arrangement of spectral lines for elements in the same family, he believed the element he called gallium (in honour of France) was the eka-aluminium predicted by Mendeleev between aluminium and indium. Since it is liquid between about 30 - 1700 deg C, a gallium in quartz thermometer can measure high temperatures. *TIS
1863 H(ugh) L(ongbourne) Callendar (18 Apr 1863, 21 Jan 1930) was an English physicist famous for work in calorimetry, thermometry and especially, the thermodynamic properties of steam. He published the first steam tables (1915). In 1886, he invented the platinum resistance thermometer using the electrical resistivity of platinum, enabling the precise measurement of temperatures. He also invented the electrical continuous-flow calorimeter, the compensated air thermometer (1891), a radio balance (1910) and a rolling-chart thermometer (1897) that enabled long-duration collection of climatic temperature data. His son, Guy S. Callendar linked climatic change with increases in carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting from mankind's burning of carbon fuels (1938), known as the Callendar effect, part of the greenhouse effect.*TIS
Callendar received awards such as the James Watt Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers (1898) and the Rumford Medal (1906).[3] He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and later a member of the Physical Society of London. Callendar was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics three times. *Wik
llustration of calorimeter by H.L. Callendar:
1892 Dmitrii Evgenevich Menshov (18 April 1892 in Moscow, Russia - 25 Nov 1988)
For his work on the representation of functions by trigonometric series, Menshov was awarded a State Prize in 1951. He was then elected a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1953. In 1958 Menshov attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh and he was invited to address the Congress with his paper On the convergence of trigonometric series. *SAU
1907 Lars Valerian Ahlfors (18 Apr 1907; 11 Oct 1996 at age 89) Finnish mathematician who was awarded one of the first two Fields Medals in 1936 for his work with Riemann surfaces. He also won the Wolf Prize in 1981.*TIS
He is remembered for his work in the field of Riemann surfaces and his textbook on complex analysis. His book Complex Analysis (1953) is the classic text on the subject and is almost certainly referenced in any more recent text which makes heavy use of complex analysis. Ahlfors wrote several other significant books, including Riemann surfaces (1960)[5] and Conformal invariants (1973).
1904 Stefan E Warschawski (18 April 1904 in Lida, Russia (now Belarus)- 5 May 1989 in San Diego, California, USA) With careful scholarship, he made lasting contributions to the theory of complex analysis, particularly to the theory of conformal mappings. With keen judgment, he guided two mathematics departments to eminence. With modest gratitude, he cemented many friendships along the way.*SAU
He wasa professor and department chair at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of California, San Diego.
After receiving his Ph.D., Warschawski took a position at Göttingen in 1930 but, due to the rise of Hitler and his own Jewish ancestry, he soon moved to Utrecht University in Utrecht, Netherlands and then Columbia University in New York City.[1]
After a sequence of temporary positions, he found a permanent faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis in 1939. During World War II he moved to Brown University and then the University of Minnesota, where he remained until his 1963 move to San Diego, where he was the founding chair of the mathematics department. Warschawski stepped down as chair in 1967, and retired in 1971, but remained active in research: approximately one third of his research publications were written after his retirement. Over the course of his career, he advised 19 Ph.D. students, all but one at either Minnesota or San Diego. Vernor Vinge is among Warschawski's doctoral students.
1911 Maurice Goldhaber (18 Apr 1911; 11 May 2011 at age 100) Austrian-American physicist who devised an experiment to show that neutrinos always rotate in one direction (only counterclockwise). His method was simple, elegant, and used an apparatus small enough to fit on a benchtop, rather than employing a huge accelerator. He also discovered that the nucleus of the deuterium atom consists of a proton and a neutron. In the decade (1961-73) that he headed the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, he oversaw the experiments there which led to three Nobel Prizes. He died at age 100.*TIS
In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England he and James Chadwick, through what they called the nuclear photo-electric effect, established that the neutron has a great enough mass over the proton to decay.
He moved to the University of Illinois in 1938. In the 1940s with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber he established that beta particles are identical to electrons.
1916 Ellis Robert Kolchin (April 18, 1916 – October 30, 1991) was an American mathematician at Columbia University. Kolchin earned a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia University in 1941 under supervision of Joseph Ritt. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954 and 1961.
Kolchin worked on differential algebra and its relation to differential equations, and founded the modern theory of linear algebraic groups.*Wik
1918 Hsien Chung Wang (18 April 1918 in Peking (now Beijing), China - 25 June 1978 in New York, USA)worked on algebraic topology and discovered the 'Wang sequence', an exact sequence involving homology groups associated with fibre bundles over spheres. These discoveries were made while he worked with Newman in Manchester. Wang also solved, at that time, an important open problem in determining the closed subgroups of maximal rank in a compact Lie group. *SAU
1928 Mikio Sato (April 18, 1928 - ) is a Japanese mathematician, who started the field of algebraic analysis. He studied at the University of Tokyo, and then did graduate study in physics as a student of Shin'ichiro Tomonaga. From 1970 Sato has been professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, of Kyoto University.
He is known for his innovative work in a number of fields, such as prehomogeneous vector spaces and Bernstein–Sato polynomials; and particularly for his hyperfunction theory. This initially appeared as an extension of the ideas of distribution theory; it was soon connected to the local cohomology theory of Grothendieck, for which it was an independent origin, and to expression in terms of sheaf theory. It led further to the theory of microfunctions, interest in microlocal aspects of linear partial differential equations and Fourier theory such as wave fronts, and ultimately to the current developments in D-module theory. Part of that is the modern theory of holonomic systems: PDEs over-determined to the point of having finite-dimensional spaces of solutions.
He also contributed basic work to non-linear soliton theory, with the use of Grassmannians of infinite dimension. In number theory he is known for the Sato–Tate conjecture on L-functions.*Wik
1945 Joseph Bernstein (April 18, 1945, ) is an Israeli mathematician working at Tel Aviv University. He works in algebraic geometry, representation theory, and number theory.
Bernstein received his Ph.D. in 1972 under Israel Gelfand at Moscow State University. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1985-86 and again in 1997-98.
Bernstein was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2002 and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2004. In 2004, Bernstein was awarded the Israel Prize for mathematics. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. *Wik
1949 Charles Louis Fefferman ( April 18, 1949, )born in Washington, D.C. In 1978 he received a Fields Medal for his work on complex analysis.*VFR As a child prodigy, his accelerated schooling resulted a B.S. degrees in physics and mathematics by age 17 and a Ph.D. in mathematics at age 20 from Princeton University (1969). When in he became a professor (1971) at the University of Chicago at the age of 22, he was the youngest full professor ever in the U.S. Two years later, he returned to Princeton as a professor (1973). His Ph.D. dissertation was on "Inequalities for Strongly Regular Convolution Operators." His field of study includes his interest in physics - applied mathematics in vibrations, heat, turbulence, though he is best known for his theoretical work. *TIS
He was a child prodigy entered the University of Maryland at age 14,[3][4][7] and had written his first scientific paper by the age of 15. He graduated with degrees in math and physics at 17, and earned his PhD in mathematics three years later from Princeton University, under Elias Stein. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Inequalities for strongly singular convolution operators". *WIK
DEATHS
1756 Jacques Cassini (18 Feb 1677; 18 Apr, (or Sometimes given 16 Apr) 1756 at age 79) French astronomer whose direct measurement of the proper motions of the stars (1738) disproved the ancient belief in the unchanging sphere of the stars. He also studied the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and the structure of Saturn's rings. His two major treatises on these subject appeared in 1740: Elements of Astronomy and Astronomical Tables of the Sun, Moon, Planets, Fixed Stars, and Satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. He also wrote about electricity, barometers, the recoil of firearms, and mirrors. He was the son of astronomer, mathematician and engineer Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712) with whom he made numerous geodesic observations. Eventually, he took over his father's duties as head of the Paris Observatory.*TIS Cassini was born at the Paris Observatory and died at Thury, near Clermont. Admitted at the age of seventeen to membership of the French Academy of Sciences, he was elected in 1696 a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and became maître des comptes in 1706. *Wik
1674 John Graunt- (24 Apr 1620, 18 Apr 1674 at age 54) English statistician, generally considered to be the founder of the science of demography, the statistical study of human populations. His analysis of the vital statistics of the London populace influenced the pioneer demographic work of his friend Sir William Petty and, even more importantly, that of Edmond Halley, the astronomer royal. *TIS
John Graunt was the first person to compile data that showed an excess of male births over female births. He also noticed spatial and temporal variation in the sex ratio, but the variation in his data is not significant. John Arbuthnott was the first person to demonstrate that the excess of male births is statistically significant. He erroneously concluded that there is less variation in the sex ratio than would occur by chance, and asserted without a basis that the sex ratio would be uniform over all time and space. (pb)
1802 Erasmus Darwin (12 December 1731 – 18 April 1802) Prominent English physician, poet , philosopher, botanist, naturalist and the grandfather of naturalist Charles Darwin and the biologist Francis Galton. Erasmus Darwin was one of the leading intellectuals of 18th century England. As a naturalist, he formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796). Although he did not come up with natural selection, he did discuss ideas that his grandson elaborated on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming "one living filament". Although some of his ideas on how evolution might occur are quite close to those of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin also talked about how competition and sexual selection could cause changes in species.. *TIS
Among many other inventions, all of which he chose not to patent, were a horizontal windmill, which he designed for Josiah Wedgwood (who would be Charles Darwin's other grandfather), a carriage that would not tip over (1766), a steering mechanism for his carriage, known today as the Ackermann linkage, that would be adopted by cars 130 years later (1759), and a method for lifting and lowering barges on canals.
The last he propose two water-filled boxes that would work as counterweights for each other as barges were lifted up or down between levels.
The Lunar Men is a wonderful book about Erasmus, hs period and his wide range of friends and contacts.
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1803 Louis François Antoine Arbogast (October 4, 1759 – April 8, or April 18, 1803) His contributions to mathematics show him as a philosophical thinker somewhat ahead of his time. As well as introducing discontinuous functions, he conceived the calculus as operational symbols. The formal algebraic manipulation of series investigated by Lagrange and Laplace in the 1770s was put in the form of operator equalities by Arbogast in 1800 in Calcul des dérivations.*SAU
1883 Édouard Albert Roche (17 Oct 1820, 18 Apr 1883 at age 62) was a French mathematical astronomer who studied the internal structure of celestial bodies and was the first to propose a model of the Earth with a solid core. He determined (1850) the Roche Limit for a satellite to have a stable orbit around a planet of equal density. The smaller body could not lie within 2.44 radii of the larger body without breaking apart from effect of the gravitational force between them. He later made a rigorous mathematical analysis of Pierre Laplace's nebular hypothesis and showed (1873) the instability of a rapidly rotating lens-shaped body.*TIS
1913 Mary Cannell (19 July 1913 in Liverpool, England - 18 April 2000) It was the work which she undertook after she retired which earns her a place as a highly respected historian of mathematics. Her work stemmed from the fact that George Green had worked as a miller near Nottingham. Green was a mathematician who was well known to almost all students of mathematics around the world, yet little was known of his life. Flauvel writes:- ... widespread knowledge of Green himself dates only from the 1970s when Cannell and other Nottingham colleagues worked to restore his windmill and his memory...When I first visited Green's windmill in Nottingham the booklet which I purchased was George Green Miller and Mathematician written in 1988 by Mary Cannell. She produced a major biography of Green, George Green : Mathematician and Physicist 1793-1841 : The Background to His Life and Work in 1993. In addition she wrote research articles on Green's life and work bringing to the world of mathematics an understanding of Green's remarkable life.
Flauvel writes:- She charmed audiences on several continents, promoting interest in Green and early 19th-century mathematical physics, in the clear tones and pure vowels of pre-war English, somewhere between Miss Marple and Dame Peggy Ashcroft. ... Mary Cannell was working on projects of one sort or another - the Green website, the revised edition of the biography, research papers, the catalogue in the university of Nottingham library - right to the end, in days filled with her characteristic energy and enthusiasm. *SAU
1923 Pieter Hendrik Schoute (January 21, 1846, Wormerveer–April 18, 1923, Groningen) was a Dutch mathematician known for his work on regular polytopes and Euclidean geometry. *Wik Schoute was a typical geometer. In his early work he investigated quadrics, algebraic curves, complexes, and congruences in the spirit of nineteenth-century projective, metrical, and enumerative geometry. Schläfli's work of the 1850's was brought to the Netherlands by Schoute who, in three papers beginning in 1893 and in his elegant two-volume textbook on many-dimensional geometry 'Mehrdimensionale Geometrie' (2 volumes 1902, 1905), studied the sections and projections of regular polytopes and compound polyhedra. ... Alicia Boole Stott (1870-1940), George Boole's third daughter (of five), ... studied sections of four- and higher-dimensional polytopes after her husband showed her Schoute's 1893 paper, and Schoute later (in his last papers) gave an analytic treatment of her constructions. *SAU
1945 Sir John Ambrose Fleming (29 Nov 1849, 18 Apr 1945 at age 95)English engineer who made numerous contributions to electronics, photometry, electric measurements, and wireless telegraphy. In 1904, he discovered the one directional current effect between a positively biassed electrode, which he called the anode, and the heated filament in an evacuated glass tube; the electrons flowed from filament to anode only. Fleming called the device a diode because it contained two electrodes, the anode and the heated filament. He noted that when an alternating current was applied, only the positive halves of the waves were passed - that is, the wave was rectified (from a.c. to d.c.). It would also take a radio frequency wave and produce d.c.corresponding to the on and off of the Morse code transmitted signals. *TIS Fleming called his invention a “thermionic valve.”
1955 Albert Einstein (14 Mar 1879; 18 Apr 1955 at age 76) German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Recognized in his own time as one of the most creative intellects in human history, in the first 15 years of the 20th century Einstein advanced a series of theories that proposed entirely new ways of thinking about space, time, and gravitation. His theories of relativity and gravitation were a profound advance over the old Newtonian physics and revolutionized scientific and philosophic inquiry.*TIS
An NBC News broadcast of his death is here.
1991 Sir Austin Bradford Hill CBE (8 July 1897 – 18 April 1991) was an English epidemiologist who pioneered the modern randomised clinical trial and, together with Richard Doll, demonstrated the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Hill is widely known for pioneering the "Bradford Hill" criteria for determining a causal association.
In 1922, Hill went to work for the Industry Fatigue Research Board. He was associated with the medical statistician Major Greenwood and, to improve his statistical knowledge, Hill attended lectures by Karl Pearson. When Greenwood accepted a chair at the newly formed London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Hill moved with him, becoming Reader in Epidemiology and Vital Statistics in 1933 and Professor of Medical Statistics in 1947.
Hill had a distinguished career in research and teaching and as author of a very successful textbook, Principles of Medical Statistics, but he is famous for two landmark studies. He was the statistician on the Medical Research Council Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee and their study evaluating the use of streptomycin in treating tuberculosis,[6] is generally accepted as the first modern randomised clinical trial. The use of randomisation in agricultural experiments had been pioneered by Ronald Aylmer Fisher. The second study was rather a series of studies with Richard Doll on smoking and lung cancer. The first paper, published in 1950, was a case-control study comparing lung cancer patients with matched controls. Doll and Hill also started a long-term prospective study of smoking and health. This was an investigation of the smoking habits and health of 40,701 British doctors for several years (British doctors study).
On Hill's death in 1991, Peter Armitage wrote, "to anyone involved in medical statistics, epidemiology or public health, Bradford Hill was quite simply the world's leading medical statistician."
1999 Gian-Carlo Rota Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999) worked on functional analysis for his doctorate and, up to about 1960, he wrote a series of papers on operator theory. Two papers in 1959-60, although still in the area of operator theory, looked at ergodic theory which is an area which requires considerable combinatorial skills. These papers seem to have led Rota away from operator theory and into the area of combinatorics. His first major work on combinatorics, which was to change the direction of the whole subject, was On the Foundations of Combinatorial Theory which Rota published in 1964.
Rota received the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1988. The Prize citation singles out the 1964 paper On the Foundations of Combinatorial Theory as:-... the single paper most responsible for the revolution that incorporated combinatorics into the mainstream of modern mathematics. *SAU
2003 Edgar Frank Codd (19 August 1923 – 18 April 2003) -American computer scientist and mathematician who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, for storing and retrieving information in computer records. He also contributed knowledge in the area of cellular automata. *TIS
Edgar Frank Codd studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in the RAF Coastal Command during the Second World War, flying Sunderlands. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer.[9] Codd first worked for the company's Selective Sequence Electronic (SSEC) project and was later involved in the development of IBM 701 and 702.
In 1953, dismayed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In 1957, he returned to the US working for IBM and from 1961 to 1965 pursuing his doctorate in computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two years later, he moved to San Jose, California, to work at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, where he continued to work until the 1980s. He was appointed IBM Fellow in 1976. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work.
Codd received the Turing Award in 1981, and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. *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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