Tuesday 25 June 2024

Nedials, Nedians, and some related triangles and some properties

 Edit of post from 2019

On the day I wrote my blog about some interesting properties of the medians of a triangle, I received a package of old Mathematics Teacher articles from Dave Renfro. One of the first I looked at was a January 1951 "Mathematical Miscellanea" edited by Phillip S. Jones. The article contained a contribution by John Satterly of the University of Toronto on a type of cevian that he called "Nedians". [My personal choice, since the "med" root is for the middle, would have just been to call them n-dians, but I'm sure that would have had a cultural backlash.]

For those who may not be familiar with the term "cevian", it refers to a segment in a triangle from a vertex to the opposite side (extended if necessary). Angle bisectors, medians, and altitudes are all cevians then, but a perpendicular bisector of a side would not be because it doesn't necessarily pass through a vertex. The name is in honor of Giovanni Ceva and was originated in France in 1888 and has spread from there.

Professor Satterly seems to have created the term "nedians" as a comparison for medians to describe a cevian that cuts the opposite side 1/n th of the way from one vertex to the next. [I shall use the notation 4-nedian for a nedian that cuts 1/4th of the way along the opposite side,] A median would be the 2-nedian.
In the image, triangle ABC has 3-nedians AD, BE, and CF where D is 1/3 of the way from B to C; E is 1/3 of the way from C to A, etc.

The intersections of the three Nedians of a triangle will form another triangle at their three points of intersection, called the nedian triangle. [JKL in the image].

Professor Satterly seems to have discovered several properties of the nedians, and their nedian triangles which I will give here; and then I have come up with several interesting properties of my own about them that I will add to this blog.

It is not too difficult using affine properties of a triangle to verify many of these.
Professor Satterly showed that the sum of the squares of the nedians would be  times the sum of the squares of the sides of the original triangle. Notice that when n=2, this reduces to 3/4, the ratio given and proved for the medians in the previous blog.

Students may wish to explore these properties by creating Sketchpad or Geogebra interactive models to confirm them, and then challenge themselves to prove them. Proving them is easier with a property of affine geometry. Every triangle is affine equivalent to every other triangle in the plane. Under affine transformations areas and lengths may change, but ratios of them are preserved... which means that you can choose any triangle... a right triangle or an equilateral triangle, to find a property about ratios of lengths or areas, and it will apply to any other triangle... and that is a BIG idea to lock away (I am not well schooled in the particulars of affine geometry, so if I have mis-stated that in some way, please advise).

Professor Satterly also stated that the Nedian triangle will have an area of \(\frac{(n-2)^2}{n^2-n+1}\) times the area of ABC. Note that for the median, or 2-nedian, the area diminishes to zero since the three medians intersect in a single point.

Professor Satterly suggested the term "backward nedian triangle" for a case in which the 1/n ratio went in the opposite order (Let D be 1/3 of the way from C to B insted). This can be eliminated if we simply allow any real number for the coefficient. Then the backward 3-nedian is just a 3/2-nedian in the regular order, and it seems that all his properties are still preserved. Notice that the areas of the 3 and 3/2-nedians are equal, but they are not congruent.

I later found that this idea Professor Satterly calls nedians was written on by Edward John Routh,   a famous Mathematical Tripos coach, in 1891 simply using the term cevians.  The idea had appeared earlier as a  question in the Mathematical Tripos of 1878. Routh's Theorem applies to any ratio between the two parts of a triangle side, even if all three sides are divided in different proportions.  







========================================================

Exploring these nedians constructions a little more, I came up with a few more properties that were not in the article. For example, the perpendicular distance from the three vertices of the nedian triangle to any side of ABC will equal the altitude of ABC to that same side. [I call these the sub-altitudes.]

Here the altitude is shown in bold red, and the three corresponding sub-altitudes are shown in dotted red. In the 3-nedian shown the distance from J to side B plus the distance from K to side B plus the distance from L to side B will equal the altitude from B to side B. A similar result exists for each altitude of the triangle. In addition, the three sub-altitudes will always partition the altitude in the same way. The shortest sub-altitude will be , while the next longer one will be  and the longest will be .

It is also clear from the last statement that each of the three small triangles at the vertices of A, B, and C will be congruent. Their bases will each be 1/n of a base of the original triangle and their heights are  so each of them is an equal fraction,  of the original area of ABC. By similar reasoning we see that all three of the quadrilaterals will also have the same area.

I also observed that that each nedian is partitioned into three parts whose lengths, in order from the vertex to 
the opposite side, are .

For the 3-nedians in the image, for example, the nedian CF is partitioned so that CJ is 3/7of CF; JL is 3/7 of CF; and LF is 1/7 of LF. A similar partition holds for the other two 3-nedians AD and BE. In a 4-nedian, the partitions would be 4/14, 8/13, and 1/14.

The Nedial Triangle




 I have played around a little more with the concept and come up with a calculation for the area of what I call a nedial triangle, extending the idea of a medial triangle.


Most High School students are introduced to the Medians of a triangle, and it is quite easy to show using basic high school geometry that the triangle whose vertices are the three feet  of the medians has an area equal to 1/4 the area of the original triangle.  In fact, it is pretty easy to show that the original triangle can be dissected into four congruent copies of the medial triangle.



If instead we use the feet of the three nedians, we get a triangle I have called the nedial triangle.  I have worked out that the area of such a triangle for an n-nedian (the cevian that cuts the opposite side 1/n th of the way along the edge) will have an area of
times the area of the original triangle ABC.  Since the median is the 2-Nedian, this gives the correct ratio for the medial triangles, 1/4.

The image below shows the 4-nedial triangle, which has an area of 7/16 the area of ABC.



The area of the three triangles at the vertices of the original triangle will each be
times the area of ABC.

The area of the nedial triangle will grow from a minimum of 1/4 the area of ABC increasing toward a limit of one as n approaches infinity.  This can be confirmed by L'Hopital's rule or simple division of the terms.  The fact that the limit is also one as n approaches one points out that when the base of the nedian is more than half way along the opposite side and the "n" in the nedian must be less than 2 but more than one we are measuring the area of what Satterly called the "backward nedians" which will create a nedial triangle of the same area. n=3/2 gives the exact area of n=3 (although the triangles are NOT congruent).  In general for every k-nedial the area given by the nedial with index equal to n/n-1 has the same area.



On This Day in Math - June 25

 


Astronomy was the cradle of the natural sciences and the starting point of geometrical theories.

~Cornelius Lanczos


The 176th day of the year; 176 and its reversal 671 are both divisible by 11. ( Students should confirm that the reverse of  any number that is divisible by 11 will also be divisible by 11.)

176 is a happy number, repeatedly iterating the sum of the squares of the digits will lead to 1, 12 + 72 + 62= 86, 82 + 62 = 100 and 12 + 02 + 02 = 1

The number 15 can be partitioned in 176 ways. For younger students, imagine all the different ways of making fifteen cents with US coins, 1 cent, 5 cents, and 10 cents.... now imagine there were also coins worth 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 cents. There would be 176 different collections of coins that would total exactly 15 cents.

176 is a Self number, it can't be written by any other number plus the sum of its digits. 21 for instance, is not a self number because 15+1+5 = 21.

8*20 + 16 = 176 so 176 = 24^2 - 20 ^2  (try this on 192 also ) and it is divisible by 16 with quotient 11, so 15^2 - 7^2 = 176.



EVENTS


1641 John Pell begins the work of expanding Walter Warner's table of anti-logarithms from 10,000 to 100,000 entries. William Warner [ (mathematician, physiologist and philosopher, and last surviving member of the circle of Thomas Hariot; he corresponded with Mersenne in 1639-40] felt he was too old to complete the laborious task he had set for  himself, and offered Pell 40 GBPounds (appx. worth 5,000 pounds today) to complete the tables and make them ready for printing.  *Thomas Harriot's Doctrine of Triangular Numbers, Beery & Stedall, pg 39

Pell's published works were few: the Controversiae pars prima in 1647, An Introduction to Algebra in 1668, and the Table of 10000 square numbers in 1672. These books represent just a fraction of a lifetime of mathematical activity; the rest can be discovered from Pell's correspondence and his unpublished papers. *John Pell (1611-1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician 2nd Edition, Malcolm & Stedall




1665 René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as a teacher for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be pneumonia—accustomed to working in bed until noon, he may have suffered a detrimental effect on his health due to Christina's demands for early morning study (the lack of sleep could have severely compromised his immune system). Others believe that Descartes may have contracted pneumonia as a result of nursing a French ambassador, Dejion A. Nopeleen, ill with the aforementioned disease, back to health. In his recent book, Der rätselhafte Tod des René Descartes (The Mysterious Death of René Descartes), the German philosopher Theodor Ebert asserts that Descartes died not through natural causes, but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest. He believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the poison because he feared Descartes's radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to Roman Catholicism by the monarch of Protestant Lutheran Sweden.*Wik

After his death in Stockholm, his body was returned to Paris, arriving on 25 Jun 1665 , though the coffin had been looted by his followers for relics in Stockholm.  Supposedly, the coffin was shipped overland from Copenhagen to avoid piracy by English admirers!  The remains were in Ste. Geneviève, then in Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments, and then finally moved to St‑Germain-des-Prés in 1819. His headstone (or gravestone) is in St‑Germain‑des‑Prés, in the second chapel on the right of the apse.   Stephen Jay Gould says the (purported) skull of Descartes is in the Musée de l'Homme, apparently on display.  Arjen Dijksman recently advised me that the Musee de l'Homme is closed for another year, and there have been efforts to move the skull to the Pantheon.
Église St-Germain-des-Prés, at 3 Place St-Germain-des-Prés, is the oldest church in Paris. Part of it dates to the 6th century, when a Benedictine abbey was founded on the site by King Childebert, son of Clovis. The church was originally built to house a relic of the True Cross brought from Spain in 542. The Normans destroyed the abbey on multiple occasions and only the marble columns in the triforium remain from the original structure. The carved capitals on the pillars are copies of the originals, which are kept in the Musée National du Moyen-Age. The church was enlarged and reconsecrated by Pope Alexander III in 1163. The abbey was completely destroyed during the Revolution, but the church was spared. The present building is a fine example of Romanesque architecture, with gothic interior elements. The square tower dating from the early 11th century, is topped by a landmark spire, which dates to the 19th century. For a time, the abbey served as a pantheon for Merovingian kings. The Chapelle Saint Symphorien, built during the Middle Ages and restored in 1981, served as the necropolis mérovingienne (crypt of the Merovingians). This is the presumed site of first tomb of Saint Germain, Bishop of Paris, who died in 576. Among the others interred here are King Jean-Casimir of Poland



1712 Brook Taylor suggested that if two glass plates which are clamped together into a “V” are placed into a pan of water then capillary action will draw water up into the shape of a rectangular hyperbola with asymptotes the surface of the water and the point of the “V.” This and several similar experiments performed by Francis Hauksbee before the Royal Society caused Newton to rethink his ideas on capillary force. *VFR



1730 Euler observes in a letter to Goldbach that 104 + 1 is divisible by 37, and that
38 +2 8 is divisible by 17. Euler cannot prove that any number is the sum of four squares. He has found another result by Fermat, namely that 1 is the only triangular number that is a fourth power (Several years earlier, Goldbach had sent an erroneous proof of this claim to D. Bernoulli) *Lemmemeyer, EULER, GOLDBACH, AND “FERMAT’S THEOREM"



1776 Captain Cook sails from Deptford on his third voyage, in the 'Resolution' with the 'Discovery' *Nat. Maritime Museum ‏@NMMGreenwich


1783  Antonie Lavoisier announced to the French Academy of Sciences that water was the product formed by the combination of hydrogen and oxygen. However, this discovery had been made earlier by the English chemist Henry Cavendish *TIS


1795 The Bureau des Longitudes is a French scientific institution, founded by decree of 25 June 1795 and charged with the improvement of nautical navigation, standardization of time-keeping, geodesy and astronomical observation. During the 19th century, it was responsible for synchronizing clocks across the world. It was headed during this time by François Arago and Henri Poincaré. The Bureau now functions as an academy and still meets monthly to discuss topics related to astronomy.
The Bureau was founded by the National Convention after it heard a report drawn up jointly by the Committee of Navy, the Committee of Finances and the Committee of State education. Henri Grégoire had brought to the attention of the National Convention France's failing maritime power and the naval mastery of England, proposing that improvements in navigation would lay the foundations for a renaissance in naval strength. As a result, the Bureau was established with authority over the Paris Observatory and all other astronomical establishments throughout France. The Bureau was charged with taking control of the seas away from the English and improving accuracy when tracking the longitudes of ships through astronomical observations and reliable clocks.
The ten original members of its founding board were:
Geometers:
Joseph-Louis Lagrange;
Pierre-Simon Laplace;
Astronomers:
Joseph Jérôme Lefrançais de Lalande;
Pierre Méchain;
Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre;
Dominique, comte de Cassini;
Jean-Charles de Borda, who carried out work related to the mechanics of fluids and precursor of Carnot because of his insights on thermodynamics;
Jean-Nicolas Buache, geographer;
Louis Antoine de Bougainville, celebrated navigator; and
Noël Simon Caroché, manufacturer of telescopes.
*Wik

 Poincaré & Arago





1903 Marie Skłodowska Curie defended her doctoral thesis on radioactive substances at Université de la Sorbonne in Paris on 25 June 1903 – becoming the first woman in France to receive a doctoral degree.

The examination committee expressed the opinion that Curie's findings, including the determination of radium’s atomic weight, represented the greatest scientific contribution ever made in a doctoral thesis.

In the committee’s three members were two future Nobel Prize laureates: Gabriel Lippmann (Physics 1908) and Henri Moissan (Chemistry 1906).




*The Noble Prize

1973 Last total solar eclipse with a maximum duration of totality longer than 7 minutes between year 0 and 4000 was June 30, 1973. The eclipse was visible in Africa. The next total solar eclipse with a duration of totality longer than 7 minutes will be on 25 June 2150 in the Pacific Ocean. Thereafter it will be 5 July 2168 in the Indian Ocean. Ref. More Mathematical AstronomicalMorsels by Jean Meeus; Willmann-Bell, 2002. *NSEC





BIRTHS


1864 Walther Hermann Nernst (25 June 1864 – 18 November 1941) German who was one of the founders of modern physical chemistry. In 1889, he devised his theory of electric potential and conduction of electrolytic solutions (the Nernst Equation) and introduced the solubility product to explain precipitation reactions. In 1906, Nernst showed that it is possible to determine the equilibrium constant for a chemical reaction from thermal data, and in so doing he formulated what he himself called the third law of thermodynamics. This states that the entropy, (a thermodynamic measure of disorder in a system), approaches zero as the temperature goes towards absolute zero. For this, he was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1918, he explained the H2-Cl2 explosion on exposure to light as an atom chain reaction. *TIS




1905 Rupert Wildt (/ˈvɪlt/; June 25, 1905 – January 9, 1976) was a German-American astronomer.
He was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in that country during World War I and its aftermath. In 1927 he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin. He joined the University of Göttingen, specializing in the properties of atmospheres.
In 1932 he studied the spectra of Jupiter, and other outer planets, and identified certain absorption bands as belonging to the hydrogen-rich compounds of methane and ammonia. The composition appeared consistent with a composition similar to the sun and other stars.
Assuming that the atmosphere was composed of these gases, during the 1940s and 1950s he constructed a model of the structure of these planets. He believed the core of the planets is solid and composed of a mixture of rock and metal, covered by a thick outer shell of ice, overlaid by a dense atmosphere. His model is still widely accepted.
In 1934 he emigrated to the United States, and became a research assistant at Princeton University from 1937 until 1942. He then became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia until 1947, before joining the faculty of the Yale University.
In 1939 he demonstrated that the major source of optical opacity in the Sun's atmosphere is the H- ion, and thus the main source of visible light for the Sun and stars.
From 1965 until 1968 he was president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. In the period 1966-1968 he also held the post of the chairman of the department of astronomy at Yale, and from 1973 until his death he was professor emeritus. He died in Orleans, Massachusetts.
His awards include the Eddington Medal in 1966. The Asteroid 1953 Rupertwildt is named after him and the crater Wildt on the Moon is also. *Wik



 1907 Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen (25 June 1907 – 11 February 1973) was a German physicist who proposed the shell theory of nuclear structure of nucleons - protons and neutrons - grouped in onion-like layers of concentric shells. He suggested that the nucleons spun on their own axis while they moved in an orbit within their shell and that certain patterns in the number of nucleons per shell made the nucleus more stable. Scientists already knew that the electrons orbiting the nucleus were arranged in different shells. For his model of the nucleus, Jensen shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics (with Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who arrived at the same hypothesis independently in the U.S.; and Eugene P. Wigner for unrelated work.) Through the 1950s, Jensen worked on radioactivity. *TiS




1928 Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov (June 25, 1928 – March 29, 2017) is a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the field of condensed matter physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003.
In two works in 1952 and 1957, Abrikosov explained how magnetic flux can penetrate a class of superconductors. This class of materials is known as type-II superconductors. The accompanying arrangement of magnetic flux lines is called the Abrikosov vortex lattice.
Abrikosov was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1966, the Fritz London Memorial Prize in 1972, and the USSR State Prize in 1982. In 1989 he received the Landau Prize from the Academy of Sciences, Russia. Two years later, in 1991, Abrikosov was awarded the Sony Corporation’s John Bardeen Award. The same year he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the Royal Academy of London, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and in 2000 was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Vitaly Ginzburg and Anthony James Leggett, for theories about how matter can behave at extremely low temperatures. *Wik




DEATHS

1671 Giovanni Riccioli (17 April 1598 – 25 June 1671) Italian astronomer who was the first to observe (1650) a double star (two stars so close together that they appear to be one) -  Mizar in Ursa Major, the middle star in the handle of the Big Dipper. He also discovered satellite shadows on Jupiter. In 1651, he assigned the majority of the lunar feature names in current use. He named the more prominent features after famous astronomers, scientists and philosophers, while the large dark and smooth areas he called "seas" or "maria". The lunar seas were named after moods (Seas of Tranquillity, Serenity) or terrestrial phenomena (Sea of Rains, Ocean or Storms) His map was published in Almagestum Novum in1651.*TIS
Riccioli studied seventy-seven objections to the Copernican thesis and after studying them Riccioli said that the weight of argument favored a “geo-heliocentric” hypothesis such as that advocated by the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Riccioli's preference for Tycho's model illustrates something important about how science is done. While today anti-Copernicans are often portrayed as Einstein characterized them (opposed to rational thinking, opposed to science), Riccioli, perhaps the most prominent of the anti-Copernicans, examined the available evidence diligently and rationally. The conclusion he reached was indeed wrong, but wrong because at that time neither the diffraction of light and the Airy disk, nor the details of the Coriolis effect, were understood. Riccioli's anti-Copernican arguments were so solid that they would become subjects of further investigation in physics, long after the Copernican theory had triumphed over the Tychonic theory.*Christopher M. Graney, Teaching Galileo, Physics Teacher V50,1



1879 Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) English inventor who worked with Charles Wheatstone in developing electric telegraphy. Of the pair, Cooke contributed a superior business ability, whereas Wheatstone is generally considered the more important of the two in the history of the telegraph. After Cooke attended a demonstration of the use of wire in transmitting messages, he began his own experiments with telegraphy (1836) and formed a partnership with Wheatstone. Their first patent (1837) was impractical because of cost. They demonstrated their five-needle telegraph on 24 July 1837 when they ran a telegraph line along the railway track from Euston to Camden Town able to transmit and successfully receive a message. In 1845, they patented a single-needle electric telegraph. *TIS





1941 Alfred Pringsheim (2 September 1850 – 25 June 1941). His work in Fourier series, analytic function theory, and continued fractions was a model of the Weierstrassian approach, although he was not a student of Weier­strass. *VFR
In mathematical analysis, Pringsheim studied real and complex functions, following the power-series-approach of the Weierstrass school. Pringsheim published numerous works on the subject of complex analysis, with a focus on the summability theory of infinite series and the boundary behavior of analytic functions.
Pringsheim's theorem concerns the convergence of a power series with non-negative real coefficients. However, Pringsheim's original proof had a flaw (related to uniform convergence), and a correct proof was provided by Ralph P. Boas. Pringsheim's theorem is used in analytic combinatorics and the Perron–Frobenius theory of positive operators on ordered vector spaces.
Besides his research in analysis, Pringsheim also wrote articles for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences on the fundamentals of arithmetic and on number theory. He published papers in the Annals of Mathematics. As an officer of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, he recorded the minutes of its scientific meetings.
Pringsheim and Ivan Śleszyński, working separately, proved what is now called the Śleszyński–Pringsheim theorem on convergence of certain continued fractions.*Wik




 1948 Bento de Jesus Caraça, GCSE, GOL (18 April 1901 – 25 June 1948) was an influential Portuguese mathematician, economist and statistician. Caraça was also a member of the Portuguese Communist Party,[citation needed] and participated in the formation of the Portuguese Movement of National Antifascist Unity and Movement of Democratic Unity in the 1940s.

Caraça was one of the founders of the Portuguese Mathematical Society in 1940,[1] and from 1945–1945 served as joint president alongside Aureliano de Mira Fernandes [pt].[4] Caraça founded the journal Gazeta de Matemática [pt] in 1940 with mathematicians António Aniceto Monteiro, Hugo Ribeiro, José da Silva Paulo and Manuel Zaluar Nunes.



1960 Walter Baade (24 Mar 1893; 25 Jun 1960 at age 67) German-American astronomer who, with Fritz Zwicky, proposed that supernovae could produce cosmic rays and neutron stars (1934), and Baade made extensive studies of the Crab Nebula and its central star. During WW II blackouts of the Los Angeles area Baade used the 100-inch Hooker telescope to resolve stars in the central region of the Andromeda Galaxy for the first time. This led to his definition of two stellar populations, to the realization that there were two kinds of Cepheid variable stars, and from there to a doubling of the assumed scale of the universe. Baade and Rudolph Minkowski identified and took spectrograms of optical counterparts of many of the first-discovered radio sources, including Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A. *TIS




1974 Cornelius Lanczos (2 Feb 1893 - 25 June 1974) worked on relativity and mathematical physics and invented what is now called the Fast Fourier Transform. *SAU Lanczos served as assistant to Albert Einstein during the period of 1928–29.*Wik





1978 Hsien Chung Wang (April 18, 1918 — June 25, 1978.)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




  Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (6 October 1903 – 25 June 1995) was an Irish physicist and Nobel laureate who first split the atom. He is best known for his work with John Cockcroft to construct one of the earliest types of particle accelerator, the Cockcroft–Walton generator. In experiments performed at Cambridge University in the early 1930s using the generator, Walton and Cockcroft became the first team to use a particle beam to transform one element to another. According to their Nobel Prize citation: "Thus, for the first time, a nuclear transmutation was produced by means entirely under human control". *Wik




1997 Jacques-Yves Cousteau (11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) French naval officer, oceanographer, marine biologist and ocean explorer, known for his extensive underseas investigations. He was co-inventor of the aqualung which made SCUBA diving possible (1943). Cousteau developed the Conshelf series of manned habitats, the Diving Saucer, a process of underwater television and numerous other platforms and specialized instruments of ocean science. In 1945 he founded the French Navy's Undersea Research Group. He modified a WWII wooden hull minesweeper into the research vessel Calypso, in 1950. An observation dome added to the foot of Calypso's bow was found to increase the ship's stability, speed and fuel efficiency. *TIS





2006 Irving "Kap" Kaplansky (March 22, 1917, Toronto – June 25, 2006, Los Angeles) was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada after his parents emigrated from Poland and attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. After receiving his Ph.D  from Harvard in 1941 as Saunders Mac Lane's first student, Kaplansky was professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1984. He was chair of the department from 1962 to 1967.
"Kap," as his friends and colleagues called him, made major contributions to group theory, ring theory, the theory of operator algebras and field theory. He published over 150 papers with over 20 co-authors. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 1984 to 1992, and the President of the American Mathematical Society from 1985 to 1986.
Kaplansky also was a noted pianist known to take part in Chicago performances of Gilbert and Sullivan productions. He often composed music based on mathematical themes. One of those compositions, A Song About Pi, is a melody based on assigning notes to the first 14 decimal places of pi.
Kaplansky was the father of singer-songwriter Lucy Kaplansky, who occasionally performs A Song About Pi in her act.
He was among the first five recipients of William Lowell Putnam fellowships in 1938.*Wik




1927  Lonnie Grafton Cross (May 22, 1927 – June 25, 2014) was an African American mathematician who took the name Abdulalim Abdullah Shabazz. With an outstanding record working to increase the participation of women, minorities, and individuals with physical disabilities into science and engineering, he was awarded the Mentor Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. *SAU






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


Monday 24 June 2024

On This Day in Math - June 24

 


"For example" is not a proof.  

Jewish proverb

The 175th day of the year;
175 is the smallest number n greater than 1 such that n^6 \(\pm 6\) are both prime. *Prime Curios & Derek Orr

175 - 25 = 150 and 150 /10 = 15 so 20^2-15^2 = 175

175 is the number of partitions of 35 into prime parts.

From Jim Wilder ‏@wilderlab : \( 175 = 1^1 + 7^2 + 5^3 \) There is one more three digit year date which has this same relation.  Find it.

A normal Magic square of order 7 has a "magic constant" of 175 for the sum of each row, column or diagonal.  The one below comes from the "Geeks For Geeks" web site, but this particular Geek wishes they had rotated it one-quarter turn clockwise so that the smallest number is in the center of the bottom row.

And if you want a unique way to create any normal magic square (and with a little imagination, lots of other odd order magic squares) for a nice way to create the one above , but rotated  https://pballew.blogspot.com/2018/06/suprise-unique-approach-for-odd-order.html



EVENTS

1497 A claim for the name America being first used for the newly discovered continent, or at least part of it. Supposedly named by John Cabot in honor of his Bristol sponsor, Welshman Robert Ameryk, a prosperous merchant. According to accounts from the period, a record for that year in the Bristol calendar stated, "... on Saint Johns Day, the land of America was found by merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew."
Thony Christie has pointed out that the above was written in a 1565 chronicle about the city of Bristol (Bristow). By that time the name America was common in Europe and does not suggest that, in fact, Cabot had used any such name. The lack of any other substantiation for this claim, and the strength of the naming for Vespucci, make this seem like local boasting.
 The first use of the name on a map was on the Waldseemuller map of 1507. As was common at the time, the map was accompanied by a cosmographia explaining the basics of cartography and how to use the map. In his  Cosmographiae Introductio  Waldseemuller makes clear that it is named for Vespucci.  Its full title translates to, "Introduction to Cosmography With Certain Necessary Principles of Geometry and Astronomy To which are added The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci A Representation of the Entire World, both in the Solid and Projected on the Plane, Including also lands which were Unknown to Ptolemy, and have been Recently Discovered".
While Cabot certainly discovered the mainland of the Americas before Vespucci, it seems that the weight of evidence for why we use the name America is weighted heavily toward the Amerigo Vespucci theory.  An excellent analysis of the evidence on that side, and the lack of evidence in support of Ameryk, is given by The Renaissance Mathematicus here.  *PB combined notes from many sources.

Detail sowing America printed *Wik



1634 Gilles Personne de Roberval was proclaimed the winner of the triennial competition for the Ramus chair at the Coll`ege Royal in Paris. Thereafter, he kept his mathematical discoveries secret so that he could continue to win the competition and keep the chair. As a consequence he lost credit for many of his discoveries. *VFR
He worked on the quadrature of surfaces and the cubature of solids, which he accomplished, in some of the simpler cases, by an original method which he called the "Method of Indivisibles"; but he lost much of the credit of the discovery as he kept his method for his own use, while Bonaventura Cavalieri published a similar method which he independently invented. 
Another of Roberval’s discoveries was a very general method of drawing tangents, by considering a curve as described by a moving point whose motion is the resultant of several simpler motions. He also discovered a method of deriving one curve from another, by means of which finite areas can be obtained equal to the areas between certain curves and their asymptotes. To these curves, which were also applied to effect some quadratures, Evangelista Torricelli gave the name "Robervallian lines."
Portrait of Gilles Personne de Roberval (1602-1675) at the inauguration of the French Academy of Sciences, 1666, where he was a founding member.

*Wik



1644 In a letter to Torricelli, Fr. Marin Mersenne gives a method to find a number with any number of factors. He explained; since 60 = 2*2*3*5 subtract one from each factor (1,1,2, 4) and make them the exponents of any primes.. he used 24*32*5*7= 5040.. Of course Plato knew much earlier that 5040 had sixty factors.In Laws, Plato suggests that 5040 is the optimal number of citizens in a state because a) It is the product of 12, 20, and 21;  b) the 12th part of it can still be divided by 12; and c) it has 59 proper divisors, including all numbers for 1 to 12 except 11, and 5038--which is very close to 5040--is divisible by 11.



1687 In a letter to Huygens, Fatio de Dullier used an integrating factor to solve the differential equation 3x dy − 2y dx = 0. No earlier instance of an integrating factor is known. The fundamental conception of integrating factors was due to Euler (1734) and further developed by Clairaut (1739). *VFR




In 1778, David Rittenhouse observed a total solar eclipse in Philadelphia. In a letter to him, dated 17 Jul 1778, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "We were much disappointed in Virginia generally on the day of the great eclipse, which proved to be cloudy." Rittenhouse (1732-1796) was not only an American astronomer, but also a mathematician and public official. He is reputed to have built the first American-made telescope and was the first director of the U.S. Mint (1792-1795).*TIS  Jefferson was an excellent applied mathematician and had contacted Rittenhouse on another occasion.  Travelling through France ten years later, " in 1788, he noticed peasants near Nancy plowing, and fell to wondering about the design of the moldboard, that is, the surface which turns the earth: he spent the next ten years working on this, on and off, wondering how to achieve the most efficient design, both offering least frictional resistance, and which also would be easy for farmers out in the frontiers to construct, far from technical help. He consulted the Pennsylvania mathematician Robert Patterson (born in Ireland in 1743), and consulted also another Philadelphia luminary, the self-taught astronomer and mathematical instrument-maker David Rittenhouse (1732-1796)."   Jefferson also communicated with Thomas Paine about bridge design, suggesting the use of catenary arches.  Jefferson is believed to be the first person ever to use the term "catenary" in English. 

 re-creation of Jefferson's improved design for the moldboard of an agricultural plow, the large, wooden part at the bottom.




1847 The first observation with the Great Refractor at Harvard was of the Moon on the afternoon of June 24, 1847. A number of significant achievements quickly followed. The eighth satellite of Saturn was discovered in 1848 by W.C. Bond and his son, George P. Bond, who was to succeed his father as Director in 1859. In 1850, Saturn's crape, or inner, ring was first observed, again by the Bonds. That same year, the first daguerreotype ever made of a star, the bright Vega, was taken by J.A. Whipple working under W.C. Bond, following several years of experiments using smaller telescopes. One of the earliest photographs of a double star, Mizar and Alcor in the handle of the Big Dipper, was achieved in 1857, using the wet-plate collodion process. *Observatory web page...  The 15 inch Great Refractor was "once the biggest and best telescope in the United States, perhaps the world."  *Frederik Pohl, Chasing Science, pg 42.



In 1898, a U.S. commemorative stamp was first used that carried the design of a major engineering construction project, the Mississippi River Bridge, a triple-arch steel bridge between East St. Louis, Illinois and St. Louis,

Missouri. Each span was roughly 500 feet and rested on piers resting on bedrock some 100 feet beneath the river bottom. Opened on 4 Jul 1874, the bridge was named after its designer, the self-trained engineer, James Eads. The upper level road also carried streetcars, which are seen in the stamp design along with steam ships on the river below. The trains that ran on its lower level are hidden from view at this angle. (Although still in use, the bridge no longer carries rail traffic.) The design was reissued in 1998.*TIS


 In 1938, scores of eyewitnesses observed the explosive roar of a huge fireball streaking over Butler County, Pa, USA. A cow was struck and injured by a falling stone. Two pieces were found of the stone meteorite, named the Chicora (for the region in which it fell), an olivine-hypersthene chondrite (amphoterite). They had masses 242g and 61g, discovered some miles short of the calculated point of impact of the main mass - which is yet to be found. The original total mass, estimated from the smoke trail and energy considerations, was 519 tons before it exploded about 12 miles up. In 1940, two more fragments were found, 400-ft from the first site. Of the eight meteorites found in the state, five were iron meteorites

Image from Pittsburgh Magazine




In 1975, a moon tremor, caused by a strike of Taurid meteors, was detected by the seismometer network left on the Moon's surface by American astronauts. The major series of lunar impacts between 22 - 26 Jun 1975 represented 5% of the total number of impacts detected during the eight years of the network's operation, and included numerous 1-ton meteorites. The impacts were detected only when the nearside of the Moon (where the astronauts landed) was facing the Beta Taurid radiant. At the same time, there was a lot of activity detected in Earth's ionosphere, which has been linked with meteor activity. The Taurid meteor storm crosses the Earth orbit twice a year, during the period 24 Jun to 6 Jul and the period 3 Nov to 15 Nov.*TIS




1978 Charon first suggested for the name of Pluto's moon. Charon was originally known by the temporary designation S/1978 P 1, according to the then recently instituted convention. On June 24, 1978, U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer James Christy who had discovered the moon, first suggested the name Charon as a scientific-sounding version of his wife Charlene's nickname, "Char."
Although colleagues at the Naval Observatory proposed Persephone, Christy stuck with Charon after discovering it coincidentally refers to a Greek mythological figure: Charon is the ferryman of the dead, closely associated in myth with the god Hades, whom the Romans identified with their god Pluto. Official adoption of the name by the IAU waited until late 1985 and was announced on January 3, 1986.
There is minor debate over the preferred pronunciation of the name. The practice of following the classical pronunciation established for the mythological ferryman Charon is used by major English-language dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary.[19][20] These indicate only one pronunciation of "Charon" when referring specifically to Pluto's moon: with an initial "k" sound. Speakers of languages other than English, and many English-speaking astronomers as well, follow this pronunciation.
However, Christy himself pronounced the ch in the moon's name as sh, after his wife Charlene. *Wik





2012 Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise dies. Also known as the Pinta giant tortoise, Abingdon Island tortoise, or Abingdon Island giant tortoise, was a subspecies of Galápagos tortoise native to Ecuador's Pinta Island.
The subspecies was described by Albert Günther in 1877 after specimens arrived in London. By the end of the 19th century, most of the Pinta Island tortoises had been wiped out due to hunting. By the mid-20th century, it was assumed that the species was extinct until a single male was discovered on the island in 1971. Efforts were made to mate the male, named Lonesome George, with other subspecies, but no viable eggs were produced. Lonesome George died on June 24, 2012. The subspecies is believed to have become extinct; however, there has been at least one first-generation hybrid individual found outside Pinta Island *Wik
Lonesome George on Pinta Island in 1972 © Ole Hamann





BIRTHS

1880 Oswald Veblen(June 24, 1880 – August 10, 1960) American mathematician, born in Decorah, Iowa, who made important contributions to differential geometry and early topology. Many of his contributions found application to atomic physics and relativity. Along with his interest in the foundations of geometry he developed an interest in algebraic topology, or analysis situs as it was then called and by 1912 was writing papers on this subject. Gradually he became more interested in differential geometry. From l922 onward most of his papers were in this area and in its connections with relativity. His work on axioms for differentiable manifolds and differential geometry contributed directly to the field.*TIS



 1883 Victor Franz Hess ( 24 June 1883 – 17 December 1964) was an Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays.

Hess shared (with Carl D. Anderson of the United States) the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936 for his discovery of cosmic rays (high-energy radiation originating in outer space). He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and was later naturalized. By means of instruments carried aloft in balloons, Hess and others proved that radiation that ionizes the atmosphere is of cosmic origin. He c (1939) a 27-day cycle of cosmic-ray intensity to the magnetic field of the sun and correlated it with the 27-day period of rotation of the sun. He also worked on devising methods for detecting minute quantities of radioactive substances. Hess made basic contributions to an understanding of radiation and its effects on the human body. *Tis



1909 William Penney (24 Jun 1909, 3 Mar 1991 at age 81)(Baron Penney of East Hendred) British nuclear physicist who led Britain's development of the atomic bomb. Penney was to Britain as Robert Oppenheimer was to the U.S. He was a prominent part of the British Mission at Los Alamos during WW II, where his principal assignment was studying the damage effects from the blast wave of the atomic bomb, but he became involved in implosion studies as well. Penney's combination of expertise, analytical skill, effective communication, and the ability to translate them into practical application soon made him one of the five members of the Los Alamos “brain trust” that made key decisions. He was the only Briton to be part of the ten man Target Committee that drew up the list of targets for the atomic bombing of Japan. *TIS




1912 Wilhelm Cauer (June 24, 1900 – April 22, 1945) was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behavior only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specification for the design of an electronic filter. *Wik
By the end of World War II, he was, like millions of less-distinguished countrymen and -women, merely a person in the way of a terrible conflagration.
Cauer succeeded in evacuating his family west, where the American and not the Soviet army would overtake it — but for reasons unclear he then returned himself to Berlin. His son Emil remembered the sad result.

The last time I saw my father was two days before the American Forces occupied the small town of Witzenhausen in Hesse, about 30 km from Gottingen. We children were staying there with relatives in order to protect us from air raids. Because rail travel was already impossible, my father was using a bicycle. Military Police was patrolling the streets stopping people and checking their documents. By that time, all men over 16 were forbidden to leave towns without a permit, and on the mere suspicion of being deserters, many were hung summarily in the market places. Given this atmosphere of terror and the terrible outrages which Germans had inflicted on the peoples of the Soviet Union, I passionately tried to persuade my father to hide rather than return to Berlin, since it was understandable that the Red Army would take its revenge. But he decided to go back, perhaps out of solidarity with his colleagues still in Berlin, or just due to his sense of duty, or out of sheer determination to carry out what he had decided to do.
Seven months after the ending of that war, my mother succeeded in reaching Berlin and found the ruins of our house in a southern suburb of the city. None of the neighbors knew about my father’s fate. But someone gave identification papers to my mother which were found in a garden of the neighborhood. The track led to a mass grave with eight bodies where my mother could identify her husband and another man who used to live in our house. By April 22, 1945, the Red Army had crossed the city limits of Berlin at several points. Although he was a civilian and not a member of the Nazi Party, my father and other civilians were executed by soldiers of the Red Army. The people who witnessed the executions were taken into Soviet captivity, and it was not possible to obtain details of the exact circumstances of my father’s death.

*ExecutedToday.com




1915 Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) English mathematician and astronomer, best known as the foremost proponent and defender of the steady-state theory of the universe. This theory holds both that the universe is expanding and that matter is being continuously created to keep the mean density of matter in space constant. He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on The Nature of the Universe, and he recalled coining the term "Big Bang" in the last of those talks. Although over time, belief in a "steady state" universe as Hoyle had proposed was shared by fewer and fewer scientists because of new discoveries, Hoyle never accepted the now most popular "Big Bang" theory for the origin of the universe. [For my historical note on "According to Hoyle, According to Cocker, nach Adam Riese. Done Right.]




1917 Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE (née Clarke; 24 June 1917 – 4 September 1996) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted the German secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946.

In June 1940, Welchman recruited Clarke to the agency. She arrived at Bletchley Park on 17 June 1940 and was initially placed in an all-women group, referred to as "The Girls", who mainly did routine clerical work. Clarke said she knew of only one other female cryptologist working at Bletchley Park.

Clarke later worked at Bletchley Park in the section known as Hut 8 and quickly became the only female practitioner of Banburismus, a cryptanalytic process developed by Alan Turing which reduced the need for bombes: electromechanical devices as used by British cryptologists Welchman and Turing to decipher German encrypted messages during World War II. Clarke's first work promotion was to Linguist Grade which was designed to earn her extra money despite the fact that she did not speak another language. This promotion was a recognition of her workload and contributions to the team.

Clarke became deputy head of Hut 8 in 1944, although she was prevented from progressing because of her sex, and was paid less than the men. Clarke and Turing had been close friends since soon after they met, and continued to be until Turing's death in 1954. 



1927 Martin Lewis Perl (June 24, 1927 – September 30, 2014) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton.
He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1955, where his thesis advisor was I.I. Rabi. Perl's thesis described measurements of the nuclear quadrupole moment of sodium, using the atomic beam resonance method that Rabi had won the Nobel Prize in Phyics for in 1944.
Following his Ph.D., Perl spent 8 years at the University of Michigan, where he worked on the physics of strong interactions, using bubble chambers and spark chambers to study the scattering of pions and later neutrons on protons. While at Michigan, Perl and Lawrence W. Jones served as co-advisors to Samuel C. C. Ting, who earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976.
Seeking a simpler interaction mechanism to study, Perl started to consider electron and muon interactions. He had the opportunity to start planning experimental work in this area when he moved in 1963 to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), then being built in California. He was particularly interested in understanding the muon: why it should interact almost exactly like the electron but be 206.8 times heavier, and why it should decay through the route that it does. Perl chose to look for answers to these questions in experiments on high-energy charged leptons. In addition, he considered the possibility of finding a third generation of lepton through electron-positron collisions. He died after a heart attack at Stanford University Hospital on September 30, 2014 at the age of 87. *Wik





DEATHS


1832 Timofei Fedorovic Osipovsky (February 2, 1766–June 24, 1832) was a Russian mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. Timofei Osipovsky graduated from the St Petersburg Teachers Seminary.
He was to became a teacher at Kharkov University. Kharkov University was founded in 1805. The city of Kharkov, thanks to its educational establishments, became one of the most important cultural and educational centers of Ukraine. Osipovsky was appointed to Kharkov University in 1805, the year of the foundation of the University. In 1813 he became rector of the University. However in 1820 Osipovsky was suspended from his post on religious grounds.
His most famous work was the three volume book A Course of Mathematics (1801–1823). This soon became a standard university text and was used in universities for many years. *Wik



1880 Jules Lissajous (March 4, 1822, Versailles – June 24, 1880, Plombières-les-Bains) was a French mathematician best known for the Lissajous figures produced from a pair of sine waves. *SAU  The curves are also called Bowditch curves for the early American mathematician, Nathanial Bowditch,  who worked with them earlier.  In general, a parametric curve with equations x= A sin(k t ); y= B sin(m t), the curves can describe things as simple as a circle or ellipse to more complex open and closed curves.  If the ratio of k/m is rational, the curve will eventually close. *PB
Lissajous invented the Lissajous apparatus, a device that creates the figures that bear his name. In it, a beam of light is bounced off a mirror attached to a vibrating tuning fork, and then reflected off a second mirror attached to a perpendicularly oriented vibrating tuning fork (usually of a different pitch, creating a specific harmonic interval), onto a wall, resulting in a Lissajous figure. This led to the invention of other apparatus such as the harmonograph.*Wik





 1978 Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh (Russian: Мстисла́в Все́володович Ке́лдыш; 10 February [O.S. 28 January] 1911 – 24 June 1978) was a Soviet mathematician who worked as an engineer in the Soviet space program.

He was the academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1946), President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1961–1975), three-time Hero of Socialist Labour (1956, 1961, 1971), and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1968). He was one of the key figures behind the Soviet space program. Among scientific circles of the USSR Keldysh was known by the epithet "the Chief Theoretician" in analogy with epithet "the Chief Designer" used for Sergei Korolev.

In 1937 Keldysh became Doctor of Science with his dissertation entitled Complex Variable and Harmonic Functions Representation by Polynomial Series, and was appointed a Professor of Moscow State University.[5] In 1943 he became a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He got his first Stalin Prize in 1946 for his works on aircraft auto-oscillations. In 1943 he also became a full member of the Academy and the Director of NII-1 (Research Institute number 1) of the Department of the Aviation Industry. He also headed the Department of Applied Mechanics of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. In 1966 this department became an independent organization as the Institute of Applied Mathematics. After his death in 1978 it is named after him to become the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics.

During the 1940s Keldysh became the leader of a group of applied mathematicians involved in almost all large scientific projects of the Soviet Union. Keldysh created the Calculation Bureau that carried most of the mathematical problems related to the development of nuclear weapons. The bureau is also credited with design of the first Soviet computers. In 1947 he became a member of the Communist Party.

Keldysh's main efforts were devoted to jet propulsion and rockets including supersonic gas dynamics, heat and mass exchange, and heat shielding. 1959 saw successful testing of the Soviet first cruise missile Burya.

In 1954 Keldysh, Sergei Korolev and Mikhail Tikhonravov submitted a letter to the Soviet Government proposing development of an artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The letter was rejected, and the group filed exaggerated Soviet newspaper articles which influenced American authorities to start satellite programs. This in turn began the effort that culminated in the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1 in October 1957, which marked the beginning of mankind's Space Age. In 1955 Keldysh was appointed chairman of the Satellite Committee at the Academy of Science. In recognition of his contribution to the problems of defense Keldysh was awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour (1956) and the Lenin Prize (1957). In 1961 he received a second Hеrо of Socialist Labour award for his contribution to Yuri Gagarin's flight into space, the first person to orbit the Earth.

In 1961 Keldysh was elected President of the Academy of Sciences and kept this position for 14 years. Concomitantly, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His last scientific works were devoted to creation of the Shuttle Buran. In 1962 he was elected a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.

Keldysh was 67 when he suddenly died on June 24, 1978. He was honoured with a state funeral and his ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on Red Square. *Wik




2009 Elena Moldovan Popoviciu (26 August 1924–24 June 2009) was a Romanian mathematician known for her work in functional analysis and specializing in generalizations of the concept of a convex function. She was a winner of the Simion Stoilow Prize in mathematics.

She studied mathematics at the Victor Babeș University in Cluj, earning a bachelor's degree there in 1947; afterwards, she became a schoolteacher. She returned to the university for doctoral study in the early 1950s, initially working with Grigore Calugăreanu, but she soon came under the influence of Tiberiu Popoviciu and began working with him in functional analysis. She completed her Ph.D. in 1960. Her dissertation, Sets of Interpolating Functions And The Notion of Convex Function, was supervised by Popoviciu. She married Popoviciu in 1964, remained at the university, and became a full professor there in 1969.

During her career, she supervised the Ph.D. thesis of 23 students. She served as the second editor-in-chief of the journal Revue d’Analyse Numérique et de Théorie de l’Approximation, founded in 1972 by her husband.





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