On This Day in Math - May 7

 

Scientists study the world as it is,
engineers create the world that never has been

~Theodore Von Karman

The 127th day of the year.  127 is the fourth Mersienne Prime, 2⁷-1.   Édouard Lucas verified 2¹²⁷-1 as prime in 1876. He is said to have spent 19 years in checking this 39 digit prime by hand. This remains the largest prime number discovered without the aid of a computer. (Lucas also invented the Towers of Hanoi Puzzle, and the game of dots and boxes which he called "La Pipopipette".)

2⁰ + 2¹ + 2² + 2³ + 2⁴ + 2⁵ + 2⁶ = 127.

127 can be expressed as the sum of factorials of the first three odd numbers (1! + 3! + 5!). 

127 is the smallest odd number that can't be written as a prime P + 2ˣ for some integer.  

17=2^2+13, 19=2^4+3,... 125 =2^6+61 , 127 .....  129 = 2^5+97

127 x \(\sqrt{62}\) is almost an integer, 999.998999999...

 And in a rare equivalence, 127 cm is equal to 50 inches. HT Don S. McDonald ‏@McDONewt

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EVENTS

1526 The first circumnavigation of the globe took place in 1519. In 1539 Cardano asked for the number of days spent if a ship sailed westward on January 1, 1517, and went three times around the earth, returning on May 7, 1526. See Sanford, History, pp. 214 and 377. *VFR

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1660 Isaack B Fubine of Savoy, in The Hague, patents macaroni *TIS (as soon as someone invents cheese, the fun eating will begin)

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1747 Johann Sebastian Bach visits King Frederick II of Prussia, the visit resulting in his Musikalische Opfer (Musical offering). See D. R. Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach, p. 4. [Manson]*VFR

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1772 Read before the Royal Society, May 7, The Sieve of Eratosthenes. Being an Account of His Method of Finding All the Prime Numbers, by the Rev. Samuel Horsley, F. R. S.

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1811  On this day in 1811, Babbage, Herschel and Peacock first met each other to discuss the possible formation of a society whose aim would be to encourage the study of Leibniz's analytical methods in Cambridge. The formal inaugural meeting of the Analytical Society took place very shortly afterwards. *SAU

*SAU

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1895 Steiger Gets "Millionaire" Patent:Otto Steiger was issued a patent for his Millionaire calculating machine. For the next 40 years, Switzerland's Hans Egli manufactured 4,700 machines, which weighed 120 pounds each. The Millionaire was notable in its ability to perform direct multiplication, which meant a user could multiply a number by a single digit with a single rotation of the handle.*CHM

In his German Patent of 1892 Steiger describes a machine which uses a mechanical representation of the multiplication table to form partial products, in the same way that a human "calculator" uses a
multiplication table committed to memory. The partial products are then transferred via a "transmitting mechanism" to a "combining and registering mechanism" for display to the operator. The Steiger's machine is to be regarded as a proper multiplication machine in that it solves problems of multiplication directly on the basis of the multiplication table, whereas other types of calculating machines are only adding machines and, as such, carry out multiplication by a continued series of additions. *Georgi Dalakov, History of Computers    

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Radio wave coherer, built by Alexander Popov

1895  Nearly everyone knows that Guglielmo Marconi was the inventor of radio, but nearly everyone is wrong about this. Marconi received the Nobel Prize in 1909 for the "development" of radio, not the invention – lots of other people were ahead of him here. Nikolai Tesla has many proponents in the United States as the inventor of radio, while in England they give the credit to Oliver Lodge, who in 1894 invented the first detector, called a coherer, which reacted to the presence of radio waves, a key step if one wants to use radio waves to communicate. It is easy to generate radio waves, but detecting them is much more difficult, and Lodge's coherer allowed one to do just that.

But if you ask anyone in Russia who invented radio, they will tell you: Alexander Stepanovich Popov. And they have a good case. On May 7, 1895 (this would be after Lodge but before Tesla and Marconi), Popov demonstrated a radio receiver to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society in St. Petersburg, and he published a paper on his device later that year. In March of 1896, Popov is supposed to have transmitted the wireless message "Heinrich Hertz" between two buildings on the campus in St. Petersburg (Hertz, a German physicist, was the first to predict the possibility of radio waves in 1888). *Linda Hall Library

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In 1952, the concept of the integrated circuit chip was first presented, at a Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington DC., by radar scientist Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. His small team of researchers at the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence, based at Malvern, Worcestershire, was working on the task of improving the reliability of the Royal Air Force's radar equipment.. He believed that it would be possible to fabricate multiple circuit elements on and into a block of silicon half an inch square. In 1956, his initial attempts to build such a circuit failed, and thereafter could get no further support for his idea. Britain lost the commercial lead. A few years later, in America, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments was awarded a U.S. patent for essentially the same idea.*TIS

Dummer

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1954 , construction began on the Mackinac Bridge including the world’s longest suspension bridge to date. It fulfilled the 70 year dream to connect 8 km (5 miles) across the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. The architect was David B. Steinman. Ceremonial ground breakings were held on this day at the St. Ignace end, and the next day on the opposite shore at Mackinaw City. Components were already being assembled in several states. Caissons were floated into position and sunk to provide the footings. On 1 Nov 1957, the bridge was opened to traffic, the automobile ferry service ended, and travel time was cut from about 2 hours to 10 minutes. It was dedicated 28 Jun 1958.

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1963, the United States launched the Telstar 2 communications satellite on behalf of its private owner, AT&T. On its tenth orbit, it transmitted the first transatlantic TV program seen in colour. It orbited with an apogee of 6,700 miles (10,800 km). This superceded AT&T's original Telstar satellite, which had ceased operating in 1962, due to transistor damage caused by radiation from a high-altitude nuclear test. Telstar 2 was built with shielding against such radiation.

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BIRTHS

Alexis Clairaut (sometimes Clairault) (7 May 1713; 17 May 1765 at age 51) was a French mathematician who worked to confirm the Newton-Huygens belief that the Earth was flattened at the poles. He was a child prodigy was studying calculus at age 10 and was admitted to the Academy of Sciences at age 18. He was the first person to estimate the mass of Venus to a close value. He also calculated the return date of Halley's comet. In about 1737, Pierre de Maupertuis led an expedition (including Clairaut) to measure a degree along a meridian in Lapland, while Bouguer and La Condamine went to Peru.  The results, even before the Peru expedition had returned, showed that Newton was correct in predicting that the earth was flattened at the poles .(various) A nice brief summary of Clairaut's life and works is here.

Title page of Alexis Clairaut, Théorie de la figure de la terre, tirée des principes de l'hydrostatique, 1743 (Linda Hall Library)

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1774 Sir Francis Beaufort (7 May 1774; 17 Dec 1857 at age 83)British naval officer, who devised (1805) a scale of wind force from 0 (calm) to 12 (hurricane) which was based on observation and so required no special instruments. [Chase]*VFR The initial scale of thirteen classes (zero to twelve) did not reference wind speed numbers but related qualitative wind conditions to effects on the sails of a man-of-war, then the main ship of the Royal Navy, from "just sufficient to give steerage" to "that which no canvas sails could withstand".
Although he devised the scale in 1805, it would not be adopted by the Royal Navy until 1830 when was an administrator. The first official use of the scale in a ships log was on December 22, 1831 by Robert Fitzroy on the first day of Darwin's voyage on the Beagle.
In 1829 Beaufort became the British Admiralty Hydrographer of the Navy. He remained at the post for 25 years. Beaufort converted what had been a minor chart repository into the finest surveying and charting institution in the world. Some of the excellent charts the Office produced are still in use today.

During his tenure, he took over the administration of the great astronomical observatories at Greenwich, England, and the Cape of Good Hope, Africa. Beaufort directed some of the major maritime explorations and experiments of that period. For eight years, Beaufort directed the Arctic Council during its search for the explorer, Sir John Franklin, lost in his last polar voyage to search for the legendary Northwest Passage. *Wik

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1832 Carl Gottfried Neumann (May 7, 1832 - March 27, 1925) He worked on a wide range of topics in applied mathematics such as mathematical physics, potential theory and electrodynamics. He also made important pure mathematical contributions. He studied the order of connectivity of Riemann surfaces.
During the 1860s Neumann wrote papers on the Dirichlet principle and the 'logarithmic potential', a term he coined. In 1890 Émile Picard used Neumann's results to develop his method of successive approximation which he used to give existence proofs for the solutions of partial differential equations.*SAU

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1854 Giuseppe Veronese (7 May 1854 – 17 July 1917) invented non-Archimedean geometries which he proposed around 1890. However Peano strongly criticised the notion due to the lack of rigor of Veronese's description and also for the fact that he did not justify his use of infinitesimal and infinite segments. The resulting argument was extremely useful to mathematics since it helped to clarify the notion of the continuum. Any fears that non-Archimedean systems would not be consistent were shown to unnecessary soon after this when Hilbert proved that indeed they were consistent.*SAU

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1880 Oskar Perron(7 May 1880 – 22 February 1975) was a German mathematician best known for the Perron paradox:
Suppose the largest natural number is N. Then if N is greater than 1 we have N² greater than  N contradicting the definition.  *SAU

He was a professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1914 to 1922 and at the University of Munich from 1922 to 1951. He made numerous contributions to differential equations and partial differential equations, including the Perron method to solve the Dirichlet problem for elliptic partial differential equations. He wrote an encyclopedic book on continued fractions Die Lehre von den Kettenbrüchen. He introduced Perron's paradox to illustrate the danger of assuming that the solution of an optimization problem exists. *Wik

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1911 Raymond Arthur Lyttleton (7 May 1911; 16 May 1995 at age 83) English mathematician and theoretical astronomer who researched stellar evolution and composition. In 1939, with Fred Hoyle, he demonstrated the large scale existence of interstellar hydrogen, refuting the existing belief of that space was devoid of interstellar gas. Together, in the early 1940's, they applied nuclear physics to explain how energy is generated by stars. In his own mongraph (1953) Lyttleton described stability of rotating liquid masses, which he extended later to explain that the Earth had a liquid core resulting from a phase change associated with a combination of intense pressure and temperature. With Hermann Bondi, in 1959, he proposed the electrostatic theory of the expanding universe. He authored various astronomy books.*TIS

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1914  Johannes de Groot (May 7, 1914 – September 11, 1972) was a Dutch mathematician, the leading Dutch topologist for more than two decades following World War II

De Groot published approximately 90 scientific papers. His mathematical research concerned, in general, topology and topological group theory, although he also made contributions to abstract algebra and mathematical analysis.

He wrote several papers on dimension theory (a topic that had also been of interest to Brouwer). His first work on this subject, in his thesis, concerned the compactness degree of a space: this is a number, defined to be −1 for a compact space, and 1 + x if every point in the space has a neighbourhood the boundary of which has compactness degree x. He made an important conjecture, only solved much later in 1982 by Pol and 1988 by Kimura, that the compactness degree was the same as the minimum dimension of a set that could be adjoined to the space to compactify it. Thus, for instance the familiar Euclidean space has compactness degree zero; it is not compact itself, but every point has a neighborhood bounded by a compact sphere. This compactness degree, zero, equals the dimension of the single point that may be added to Euclidean space to form its one-point compactification. A detailed review of de Groot's compactness degree problem and its relation to other definitions of dimension for topological spaces is provided by Koetsier and van Mill.  

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1921 Bent Christiansen (7 May, 1921 - 3 Sept, 1996)  From his Obituary: "Bent was a legend in mathematics education in Denmark and the Nordic countries. His impact on the development of the teaching and learning of mathematics in primary and lower secondary education can hardly be over-estimated. He wrote textbooks and books on mathematics education, especially the very influential 'Goals and means in basic mathematics education' ('Mål og midler I den elementære matematikundervisning', 1967). He gave innumerable in-service courses and invited lectures at meetings and conferences. Naturally, he also served on hosts of national committees, including the Danish National Sub-Commission of ICMI (1961-1972). All this earned him a reputation as a charismatic, enthusiastic and extremely energetic mentor for generations of mathematics teachers, teacher trainers and colleagues."

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1927 Allen Shields (7 May 1927 New York – 16 September 1989 Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA) worked on a wide range of mathematical topics including measure theory, complex functions, functional analysis and operator theory.

A special issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, for which he served as editor of the "Years Ago" column, was dedicated to his memory in 1990.

*Wik

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1939  Sidney Altman (May 7, 1939 – April 5, 2022) was a Canadian-American[1] molecular biologist, who was the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas R. Cech for their work on the catalytic properties of RNA.

While at Yale, Altman's Nobel Prize work came with the analysis of the catalytic properties of the ribozyme RNase P, a ribonucleoprotein particle consisting of both a structural RNA molecule and one (in prokaryotes) or more (in eukaryotes) proteins. Originally, it was believed that, in the bacterial RNase P complex, the protein subunit was responsible for the catalytic activity of the complex, which is involved in the maturation of tRNAs. During experiments in which the complex was reconstituted in test tubes, Altman and his group discovered that the RNA component, in isolation, was sufficient for the observed catalytic activity of the enzyme, indicating that the RNA itself had catalytic properties, which was the discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize. Although the RNase P complex also exists in eukaryotic organisms, his later work revealed that in those organisms, the protein subunits of the complex are essential to the catalytic activity, in contrast to the bacterial RNase P.

Altman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988[8] and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1990.  *Wik

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DEATHS

1617 David Fabricius, (March 9, 1564 – May 7, 1617)a Protestant minister, was killed by a parishioner angered upon being accused by him as a thief.   A German astronomer, friend of Tycho Brahe and Kepler, and one of the first to follow Galileo in telescope observation of the skies. He is best known for a naked-eye observation of a star on Aug 3, 1596, subsequently named Omicron Ceti, the first variable star to be discovered, and now known as Mira. Its existence with variable brightness contradicted the Aristotelian dogma that the heavens were both perfect and constant. With his son, Johannes Fabricius, he observed the sun and noted sunspots. For further observations they invented the use of a camera obscura and recorded sun-spot motion indicating the rotation of the Sun. *TIS  [re: invented, The Camera Obscura (Latin for dark room) was a dark box or room with a hole in one end. If the hole was small enough, an inverted image would be seen on the opposite wall. Such a principle was known by thinkers as early as Aristotle (c. 300 BC). It is said that Roger Bacon invented the camera obscura just before the year 1300, but this has never been accepted by scholars; more plausible is the claim that he used one to observe solar eclipses. In fact, the Arabian scholar Hassan ibn Hassan (also known as Ibn al Haitam), in the 10th century, described what can be called a camera obscura in his writings..]

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1934 Karl Friedrich Geiser (26 Feb 1843 in Langenthal, Bern, Switzerland, 7 May 1934 in Küsnacht, Zürich, Switzerland) Swiss mathematician who worked in algebraic geometry and minimal surfaces. He organised the first International Mathematical Congress in Zurich.*SAU

In addition to his research results, Geiser's participation in the development of Switzerland's education system is remarkable. He was helped by his relationships (partly due to his family connection with Jakob Steiner) with eminent politicians and mathematicians. Geiser published previously unpublished lecture notes and treatises from Steiner's Nachlass.[3] Geiser and Ferdinand Rudio were two of the main organizers of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1897 in Zürich.*Wik

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1963  Theodore von Karman (May 11, 1881 – May 7, 1963)Hungarian-American aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization.*Wikipedia [another who died very close to his birthday (May 11), someday I must do statistics on this.]  He was director of the Institute for Aerodynamics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) in AACHEN, Nordrhein-Westfalen, in 1913-1934. The main lecture theatre complex is named the Kármán Auditorium and there is a photo and a bust of him in the foyer.  He is buried in a vault in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, Ca. USA

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2007 Emma Markovna Lehmer (née Trotskaia) (November 6, 1906 – May 7, 2007) was a mathematician known for her work on reciprocity laws in algebraic number theory. She preferred to deal with complex number fields and integers, rather than the more abstract aspects of the theory. At UC Berkeley, she started out in engineering in 1924, but found her niche in mathematics. One of her professors was Derrick N. Lehmer, the number theorist well known for his work on prime number tables and factorizations. While working for him at Berkeley finding pseudosquares, she met her future husband Derrick H. Lehmer. Upon her graduation summa cum laude with a B.A. in Mathematics (1928), Emma married the younger Lehmer. They moved to Brown University, where Emma received her M.Sc., and Derrick his Ph.D., both in 1930. Emma did not obtain a Ph.D. herself. Most universities had nepotism rules which prevented husband and wife from both holding teaching positions, although Emma claimed there were many advantages to not holding a Ph.D.
The Lehmers had two children, Laura (1932) and Donald (1934). Emma did independent mathematical work, including a translation from Russian to English of Pontryagin's book Topological Groups. She worked closely with her husband on many projects; 21 of her 60-some publications were joint work with him. Her publications were mainly in number theory and computation, with emphasis on reciprocity laws, special primes, and congruences. *Wik

Photo by Paul Halmos

*SAU

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2017  Wu Wenjun (Chinese: 吴文俊; 12 May 1919 – 7 May 2017), also commonly known as Wu Wen-tsün, was a Chinese mathematician, historian, and writer. He was an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), best known for Wu class, Wu formula, and Wu's method of characteristic set.

He was also active in the field of the history of Chinese mathematics. He was the chief editor of the ten-volume Grand Series of Chinese Mathematics, covering the time from antiquity to late part of the Qin dynasty.

In 1957, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1986 he was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Berkeley.[2] In 1990, he was elected as an academician of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).

Along with Yuan Longping, he was awarded the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award by President Jiang Zemin in 2000, when this highest scientific and technological prize in China began to be awarded. He also received the TWAS Prize in 1990[3] and the Shaw Prize in 2006. He was the President of the Chinese society of mathematics. He died on May 7, 2017, 5 days before his 98th birthday.

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2018 Peter Andreas Grünberg (German pronunciation: [18 May 1939 – 7 April 2018) was a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.

In 1986 he discovered the antiparallel exchange coupling between ferromagnetic layers separated by a thin non-ferromagnetic layer, and in 1988 he discovered the giant magnetoresistive effect (GMR). GMR was simultaneously and independently discovered by Albert Fert from the Université de Paris Sud. It has been used extensively in read heads of modern hard drives. Another application of the GMR effect is non-volatile, magnetic random access memory.

Apart from the Nobel Prize, work also has been rewarded with shared prizes in the APS International Prize for New Materials, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Magnetism Award, the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize, the Wolf Prize in Physics and the 2007 Japan Prize. He won the German Future Prize for Technology and Innovation in 1998 and was named European Inventor of the Year in the category "Universities and research institutions" by the European Patent Office and European Commission in 2006.

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