Wednesday, 31 July 2024

On This Day in Math - July 31

                                                    



I advise my students to listen carefully the moment
they decide to take no more mathematics courses.
They might be able to hear the sound of closing doors.

~Caballero, James

The 212th day of the year; Besides being the Fahrenheit boiling point of water at sea level, 212 produces a prime of the form k10+k9+...+k2+k+1, when k=212. Edward Shore@edward_shore sent me a note:" That number would be 184,251,916,841,751,188,170,917.")
(students might explore different values of k, and different maximum exponents to produce primes..ie when k is 2, then 26 +25+...+22+2+1 is prime

The smallest even three-digit integer, abc, such that (abc)/(a*b*c) is also prime. [ie 212/(2*1*2)= 53 ]*Prime Curios

212 is a palindrome whose square is also a palindrome, 2122= 44944. It is the last year date for which this is true. It is also a palindrome in base 3(21212) with a copy of it's base 10 representation.

And I just learned from @fermatslibrary that 212 is in a palindromic approximation for π

666/212 = 3.141509... good for four decimal places.  





EVENTS


1669 Lucasian professor Isaac Barrow sent John Collins a manuscript of Newton’s De analysi and thereby Newton’s anonymity began to dissolve. It was a summary of Newton’s work on the calculus and was written after Newton saw Nicholas Mercator’s Logarithmotechnia (1668).

\( ln(1+x) = x -\frac{x^2}{2} + \frac{x^3}{3} -\frac{x^4}{4}+\cdots \)

Newton wrote his paper in order that he would not lose credit for his work on infinite series. Collins immediately recognized Newton’s genius. Although not published until 1711, this paper led to Newton’s appointment as Lucasian professor on 29 October 1669.*VFR




1730 Goldbach proves that Fermat numbers are pairwise coprime. (Fermat had said that the he thought the numbers of the form \( 2^{2^n} +1 \) were all prime, although he could not prove it. The first five are (n=0...4) but Euler would prove the n=5 case was not prime by factoring it. No more primes have been found after n=4, but there is no proof there can not be more. I think this story, and Goldbach's discovery, make an interesting approach to proving the primes are infinite.) He claims that 1 is the only square among the triangular numbers *Euler Goldbach Correspondence




1744   Euler to Goldbach , "All around here chess is played passionately." He then mentions a certain strong local player he had been taking lessons from, then adds, "I am winning most games with him."  Master of us all in more ways than I knew.  *S. Strogatz


1790 The U.S. Patent Office issued its first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for his “process for making pot and pearl ashes,” whatever they are. Since George Washington and Thomas Jefferson signed Hopkins’ patent, more than 4 million have been issued. *VFR In 1790, the first U.S. patent was granted to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a process for making potash and pearl ashes. Potash was important as an ingredient in soap and fertilizer. The patent was granted for a term of 14 years and signed by President George Washington, who had the previous month signed the first U.S. patent statute into law on 10 April 1790. Hopkins did not get Patent with a serial No.1 as thousands of patents were issued before the Patent Office began to number them. Congress had passed the Patent Act on 10 Apr 1790. Two other patents were granted that year - one for a new candle-making process and the other the flour-milling machinery of Oliver Evans. The next year, 1791, Samuel Hopkins also was granted the first Canadian patent.*TIS
*C. Pickover


1851 Gauss witnessed the opening ceremonies when the newly constructed railway from Cassel reached Gottingen. *VFR

1943 Ireland issued—as its first stamp with a mathematical theme—two stamps to celebrate the centenary of the discovery of Quaternions by Sir William Rowan Hamilton. [Scott #126-7]. *VFR



1990The U.S. government panel approved the use of gene therapy to treat human disease. Gene therapy uses DNA to treat disease, usually by replacing a faulty gene with a healthy copy. Recent clinical studies suggest this technique holds promise for the future treatment of Parkinson’s disease. *.rsc.org


In 2003, Felix Baumgartner became the first man to cross the English Channel by unpowered flight. He jumped from a plane about 9,800-m (30,000-ft) above Dover, England and glided 36-km (22-mi) across the Channel in a 10-min flight wearing a special suit with carbon-fibre wings across his back. In sub-zero air, the 34-yr-old Austrian's flight began at about 220 mph, slowing to around 135 mph by the time he landed by parachute at Cap Blanc-Nez, near Calais, in France. He was equipped with oxygen, cameras and hi-tech data monitors to enable his journey to be tracked. His wing span of 1.8-m was about 10-cm longer than another he used a few weeks earlier to win a race against an aeroplane in the U.S.*TiS
He is widely known for jumping to Earth from a helium balloon from the stratosphere on 14 October 2012 and landing in New Mexico, United States, as part of the Red Bull Stratos project. Doing so, he set world records for skydiving an estimated 39 km (24 mi), reaching an estimated top speed of 1,357.64 km/h (843.6 mph), or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to break the sound barrier relative to the surface without vehicular power on his descent *Wik



2015 The second full moon this month (the other was on the 2nd). This only happens “Once in a blue moon”—and this is the origin of the phrase. Consequently, there were be thirteen full moons this year.  The last "blue moon" was in 1985, and the next is predicted in 2018.
The next blue moon takes place on 31 August 2023. As this Moon is also a supermoon, it will be a Super Blue Moon.
Supermoon: A Full or New Moon that occurs when the center of the Moon is less than 360,000 kilometers (ca. 223,694 miles) from the center of Earth.

*Farmer's Almanac





BIRTHS

1704 Gabriel Cramer (31 July 1704 – 4 January 1752). He is best known for “Cramer’s Rule,” a method for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations using determinants. *VFR Gabriel Cramer (31 July 1704 – 4 January 1752) was a Swiss mathematician, born in Geneva. He showed promise in mathematics from an early age. At 18 he received his doctorate and at 20 he was co-chair of mathematics. In 1728 he proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox that came very close to the concept of expected utility theory given ten years later by Daniel Bernoulli. He published his best known work in his forties. This was his treatise on algebraic curves, "Introduction à l'analyse des lignes courbes algébriques", published in 1750. It contains the earliest demonstration that a curve of the n-th degree is determined by n(n + 3)/2 points on it, in general position. He edited the works of the two elder Bernoullis; and wrote on the physical cause of the spheroidal shape of the planets and the motion of their apsides (1730), and on Newton's treatment of cubic curves (1746). He was professor at Geneva, and died at Bagnols-sur-Cèze.*Wik

*Geeks For Geeks


1712 Samuel König (July 31, 1712, Büdingen – August 21, 1757, Zuilenstein near Amerongen) was a German mathematician who is best remembered for his part in a dispute with Maupertuis over the Principle of Least Action.*SAU

1718 John Canton (31 July 1718 – 22 March 1772) British physicist and teacher, born Stroud, Gloucestershire. He made a number of minor discoveries in physics and chemistry. As a result of preparing artificial magnets in 1749 he was elected to the Royal Society. In 1762, he demonstrated that water was slightly compressible. He invented a number of devices in connection with electricity. His notable work, between 1756 and 1759, was to record that on days when the aurora borealis was particularly bright, a compass needle behaved with more irregularity than usual. Thus he was the first to record this as an electromagnetic phenomenon for what is now known to be a magnetic storm.*TIS



1810 Oliver Byrne (31 July 1810 – 9 December 1880) was a civil engineer and prolific author of works on subjects including mathematics, geometry, and engineering. He is best known for his 'colored' book of Euclid's Elements. He was also a large contributor to Spon's Dictionary of Engineering.
His most innovative educational work was a version of the first six books of Euclid's Elements that used colored graphic explanations of each geometric principle. It was published by William Pickering in 1847.

The book has become the subject of renewed interest in recent years for its innovative graphic conception and its style which prefigures the modernist experiments of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Information design writer Edward Tufte refers to the book in his work on graphic design and McLean in his Victorian book design of 1963. In 2010 Taschen republished the work in a facsimile edition and in 2017 a project was launched to extend the work to the remaining works of Euclid.

Byrne described himself as a mathematician, civil engineer, military engineer, and mechanical engineer and indicates on the title pages of one of his books that he was surveyor of Queen Victoria's settlement in the Falkland Islands. Evidence shows Byrne never traveled to the Falkland Islands.




1826 Daniel Friedrich Ernst Meisse (31 July 1826, 11 March 1895)  his mathematical work covers number theory, work on Möbius inversion and the theory of partitions as well as work on Bessel functions, asymptotic analysis, refraction of light and the three body problem. 
He worked on prime numbers and found, in the 1870s, a method for computing individual values of 
π(x), the counting function for the number of primes less than or equal to 𝑥.  His method was based on recurrences for partial sieving functions, and he used it to compute π(107), π(108), and π(109 ). He found that there are 664,599 primes less than π(107), there are 5,761,455 primes less than π(108)  and 50,847,478 primes less than π(109 ) . However Derrick Lehmer simplified and extended Meissel's method 70 years later, and showed Meissel's value of π(109) was too small by 56. *SAU



1843 Friedrich Robert Helmert (July 31, 1843 – June 15, 1917) German geodesist and an important writer on the theory of errors.
From 1887 Helmert was professor of advanced geodesy at the University of Berlin and director of the Geodetic Institute.
Helmert received many honours. He was president of the global geodetic association of "Internationale Erdmessung", member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1905, and recipient of some 25 German and foreign decorations. *TIA



1858 Richard Dixon Oldham (31 July 1858 – 15 July 1936) Irish geologist and seismologist who discovered evidence for the existence of the Earth's liquid core (1906). In studying seismograms of great 1897 Indian Earthquake he identified P (primary) and S (secondary) waves. It is interesting that he did not get a clue to the presence of the core from the S waves, which are actually incapable of being transmitted through the liquid of the outer core. (The liquid core does not transmit the shear wave energy released during an earthquake.) Rather he noted the existence of a shadow zone in which P waves from an earthquake in the opposite hemisphere of the earth failed to appear*TIS



1863 George Abram Miller (31 July 1863 – 10 February 1951) was an early group theorist whose many papers and texts were considered important by his contemporaries, but are now mostly considered only of historical importance.
Miller helped in the enumeration of finite groups of degree 8, 9, and 10. Arthur Cayley had listed 198 groups of degree 8 in 1891, and Miller found two more making the total 200 in 1893. Camille Jordan had given a list for degree 9 in 1872, re-examined by Cole, and brought up to 258 groups by Miller. In 1894 Miller produced a list of 294 intransitive groups of degree 10. In consequence, the Academy of Science of Cracow awarded a prize and "Miller came to prominence in the mathematical world abruptly."

Miller was born in Lynnville, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and died in Urbana, Illinois.*Wik



1923 Joseph Bishop Keller (July 31, 1923 – September 7, 2016) is an American mathematician who specializes in applied mathematics. He is best known for his work on the "Geometrical Theory of Diffraction" (GTD).
He worked on the application of mathematics to problems in science and engineering, such as wave propagation. He contributed to the Einstein-Brillouin-Keller method for computing eigenvalues in quantum mechanical systems.
In 1988 he was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science, and in 1997 he was awarded the Wolf Prize by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation. In 1996, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics.*Wik



1923 Beauregard Stubblefield (31 July 1923, Navasota, Texas, - 17 January 2013
Atlanta, Georgia,)  
Stubblefield was the son of the watchmaker Clayton S Stubblefield and his wife Josephine Odessa Taylor who was a teacher. He was the second of his parents four children, having an older brother Cedric, a younger sister Iris and a younger brother Elwyn. The family moved to Houston when he was a young child. He attended Burrus Elementary and Junior High School, moving to Booker T Washington High School, a school for African Americans in Dallas, Texas, graduating in 1940. He then entered Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical College on 5 September 1940 where he was taught mathematics by Clarence Francis Stephens. His remarkable mathematical abilities were quickly seen by Stephens who gave him one-to-one tuition. Stubblefield had been taught watchmaking by his father and was able to earn enough money to support his education. He graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in 1943 and, continuing to study supported by a scholarship, he was awarded a Master's Degree in 1945. His Master of Science thesis, supervised by A W Randall, was Computation Of The Real And Complex Roots Of Algebraic And Transcendental Equations.

Despite his excellent record, he was turned down for graduate work at several universities. When he received no answer from the University of Michigan, he went there in person and, impressed by his determination, he was offered a place. When he was told that since he had funding from Texas, he would have to pay Michigan more, he left and worked for the Hollis Jewelery store as a watchmaker for several years earning money to continue his studies. Returning to the University of Michigan, he was awarded an M.S. in 1951. He was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Liberia at Monrovia from 1952-1956, then worked as a Research Mathematician at Detroit Arsenal 1957-59. During this time he was undertaking research for his Ph.D. He published results from his thesis in the paper Some imbedding and nonimbedding theorems for n-manifolds (1962).

He was an assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey (1960-1961), then an associate Professor of Mathematics at Oakland University in Michigan (1961-1967). After a spell as a Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at Texas Southern University, he was appointed Director of Mathematics in the Thirteen College Curriculum Program in 1969. In the paper New Approaches to General Education Mathematics for Developing Colleges (1971) he explained about this Program:
The Thirteen College Curriculum Program is a consortium of developing colleges which aims to improve freshman instruction and curriculum materials. As a large and promising project it is supported by private and public funds. ... The Program was launched in the Summer of 1967 with a writing conference. The conferees devised a new freshman program which attempted to release students from intellectual ruts in formalism and boredom. The course was called "Quantitative and Analytical Thinking," and the materials and techniques were tested on the thirteen campuses the following academic year. (Participants worked in close liaison with curriculum experts of the Curriculum Resources Group of the Institute for Services to Education who provided much of the inspiration for the emergent Thirteen College philosophy and techniques.) This pattern was repeated in successive years.
He was Professor of Mathematics at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina (1971-1976), and then at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Boulder, Colorado where he worked until he retired in 1992. He died on 17 January 2013 in Atlanta, Georgia. *SAU




1923 Stephanie Kwolek (31 Jul 1923; 18 Jun 2014 at age 90) American chemist and inventor of Kevlar. Shortly after graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry (1946), she began a career at DuPont's textile fibers department in Buffalo, New York. Kwolek was assigned to search for a new, high-performance fiber that would be acid- and base-resistant and stable at high temperatures, suitable to replace steel in radial tyres. After extensive experimentation, she created a polymer solution which, when spun into a fibre, was five times stronger than steel and had half the density of fiberglass. It was named Kevlar. Today, this fibre is used to make bullet-proof jackets military helmets, aircraft parts, inflatable boats, gloves, rope, and building materials. Kwolek never pursued a Ph.D. degree. She was the fourth woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1995).TiS




1927 Felix Earl Browder ( July 31, 1927 – December 10, 2016) was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Society until 2000. His two younger brothers also became notable mathematicians, William Browder (an algebraic topologist) and Andrew Browder (a specialist in function algebras).
Felix Earl Browder was born in 1927 in Moscow, Russia, while his American father Earl Browder, born in Wichita, Kansas, was living and working there. He had gone to the Soviet Union in 1927. His mother was Raissa Berkmann, a Russian Jewish woman from St. Petersburg whom Browder met and married while living in the Soviet Union. As a child, Felix Browder moved with his family to the United States, where his father Earl Browder for a time was head of the American Communist Party and ran for US president in 1936 and 1940. A 1999 book by Alexander Vassiliev, published after the fall of the Soviet Union, said that Earl Browder was recruited in the 1940s as a spy for the Soviet Union.

Felix Browder was a child prodigy in mathematics; he entered MIT at age 16 in 1944 and graduated in 1946 with his first degree in mathematics. In 1946, at MIT he achieved the rank of a Putnam Fellow in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. In 1948 (at age 20), he received his doctorate from Princeton University.






1943 Ireland issued—as its first stamp with a mathematical theme—two stamps to celebrate the centenary of the discovery of Quaternions by Sir William Rowan Hamilton. [Scott #126-7].*VFR

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1945 John O'Connor (31st July 1945 in Luton, Bedfordshire, England.- )
Lists his Research interests A lapsed topologist, I am interested in Computational Algebra.
I am interested in the History of Mathematics and at present am supervising two research students in this area. * His Personal web page
He is best known as one of the creators of the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. *SAU






DEATHS

1726 Nikolaus II Bernoulli died (February 6, 1695, Basel, Switzerland – July 31, 1726, St. Petersburg, Russia). *VFR Nicolaus(II) Bernoulli was the favourite of three sons of Johann Bernoulli. He made important mathematical contributions to the problem of trajectories while working on the mathematical arguments behind the dispute between Newton and Leibniz.*SAU



1784 Denis Diderot died. (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent persona during the Enlightenment and is best-known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie. *Wik

1896 Ludwig Christian Wiener (7 December 1826 Darmstadt – 31 July 1896 Karlsruhe) was a German mathematician, physicist and philosopher, known for his explanation of Brownian motion , which identified him as a skillful experimenter. He mainly dealt with geometry.*Wik




1913 John Milne (30 December 1850 – 31 July 1913) English seismologist who invented the horizontal pendulum seismograph (1894) and was one of the European scientists that helped organize the seismic survey of Japan in the last half of the 1800's. Milne conducted experiments on the propagation of elastic waves from artificial sources, and building construction. He spent 20 years in Japan, until 1895, when a fire destroyed his property, and he returned home to the Isle of Wight. He set up a new laboratory and persuaded the Royal Society to fund initially 20 earthquake observatories around the world, equipped with his seismographs. By 1900, Milne seismographs were established on all of the inhabited continents and he was recognized as the world's leading seismologist. He died of Bright's disease*TIS


Milne died of Bright's disease on 31 July 1913 and, after a service in St. Paul's Church, Newport, was buried in the civic cemetery to the north of the church.[14] His Japanese wife Tone returned to Japan in 1919 and died in 1926.*Wik





1980 Ernst Pascual Jordan ( 18 October 1902 – 31 July 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix mechanics, and developed canonical anticommutation relations for fermions. He introduced Jordan algebras in an effort to formalize quantum field theory; the algebras have since found numerous applications within mathematics.

Jordan joined the Nazi Party in 1933, but did not follow the Deutsche Physik movement, which at the time rejected quantum physics developed by Albert Einstein and other Jewish physicists. After the Second World War, he entered politics for the conservative party CDU and served as a member of parliament from 1957 to 1961.




2016   Seymour Papert ( 1 Mar 1928, 31 Jul 2016) American computer scientist who invented the Logo computer programming language, an educational computer programming language for children. He studied under Piaget, absorbing his educational theories. He has studied ways to use mathematics to understand better how children learn and think, and about the ways in which computers can aid in a child's learning. With Marvin Minsky, he co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. In the mid-80s he worked in Costa Rica to develop a nationwide program of intensive computer use throughout the public education system. Costa Rica, which now has the highest literacy rate in the A mericas, continues to serve as a model for large-scale deployment of computer technology in education. *TiS
Papert with a Turtle robot




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

Tuesday, 30 July 2024

On This Day in Math - July 30

 



I have created a new universe from nothing.

~Janos Bolyai

The 211th Day of the Year
The 211th day of the year; 211 is a primorial prime,(a prime that is one more, or one less than a primorial  can you find the next larger (or smaller) primorial prime?

211 is also the sum of three consecutive primes (67 + 71 + 73)...

There are 211 primes on a 24-hour digital clock. (00:00 - 23:59) *Derek Orr @ Derektionary

 211 is the 4th** Euclid number: 1 + product of the first n primes.(after Euclid's method of proving the primes are infinite. most Euclid numbers, unlike 211, are not themselves prime, but are divisible by a prime different than any of the primes in the product n#) (**some would call it the fifth since Euclid seemed to consider 1 as a unit as similar to the primes.)

211 is a prime lucky number, and there are 211 lucky primes less than 10^4 (or 10 ^(2+1+1))*Prime Curios

211 is the concatenation of the smallest one digit prime and the smallest two digit prime, 2, 11.

211 = 3^5 - 2^5, two consecutive fifth powers, it is only the second, following 31, and is the last year date with the property.

Hardy wrote a New Year Resolution in a card to Ramujan to get 211, none out, in a cricket test match at the oval.

A Lazy Caterer number, A Pizza can be cut into 211 pieces with 20 straight cuts.

211 is a repunit in base 14 (111)14^2 + 14 + 1

211 is also SMTP status code for system status.*Wik

211 is an odd number, so it is the difference of two consecutive squares, 106^2 - 105^2 = 211 

211 is the first of fifteen consecutive odd numbers that sum to the cube of 15, 3375

211 is a prime of the form 4k+3. According to Gauss' reciprocity law, if two numbers, p and q are in this sequence then there exists a solution to only one of x^2 = p (mod q) or x^2 = q (mod p). 3 is another number in the sequence. Can you find an x^2 so that one of these congruences is true?

And one more from *Prime Curios. If you've ever heard the expression "a month of Sundays," for something that takes a really long time that's 31 Sundays, starting on a Sunday and going for 30 more weeks to end on a Sunday, or 211 days, Sunday to Sunday.

See More Math Facts for every Year Day here.

EVENTS


1738 Euler sends a letter to John Bernoulli with the solution to a question from Danial Bernoulli regarding isoperimetric curves, particularly the  one for which the integral of rm gave a maximum or minimum.

It was Johann Bernoulli who tutored Euler in mathematics when he was young, and who started Euler on his path to scientific greatness. Their collected correspondence covered 38 letters.




1859 Bernhard Reimann is appointed full professor at Gottingen, succeeding his two former teachers, Gauss and Dirichlet. He also is allowed to occupy Gauss' apartments at the observatory. *John Derbyshire, Prime Obsession, pg 135




In 1898, Corn Flakes were invented by William Kellogg. At Battle Creek Sanitarium, Sanitarium superintendent, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg, his younger brother and business manager, invented many grain-based foods, including a coffee substitute, a type of granola, and peanut butter to provide patients a strict nutritious diet. In 1894 they unintentionally invented a flaked cereal process based on wheat. By 1898, W.K. Kellogg had developed the first flaked corn cereal. Patients enjoyed the cereals and wanted more to take home. In 1906, the Battle Creek Toaster Corn Flake Company was founded by W.K. Kellogg.*TIS




1907 The Axiom of Choice is usually given as created by Zermelo in 1908, presumably because that was the year it appeared in Mathematische Annalen, but the date on the actual paper is "Chesières, 30 July 1907.". The paper contains, "AXIOM VI. (Axiom of choice). If T is a set whose elements all are sets that are different from 0 and mutually disjoint, its union "union of T" includes at least one subset S1 having one and only one element in common with each element of T." [The original German read "Axiom der Auswahl".]
Ernst Zermelo used the Axiom of Choice to prove that every set can be well-ordered on a paper of 1904, but did not use the name "Axiom of Choice". *Jeff Miler, Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics




1918 Richard Courant sat down with Ferdinand Springer and signed a contract for the series of books now famous as the “Yellow Series.” *Constance Reid, Courant in Gottingen and New York, p. 72


1971 Apollo 15 mission became the fourth mission to land on the moon when the Falcon lunar lander touched down. This mission allowed the astronauts to spend more time on the surface of the moon. The lander stayed three days on the surface and the crew conducted over 18 hours of outside work. They also were aided for the first time by a lunar rover vehicle.*Science Today


1983 The Sumida River Festival in Tokyo celebrated its 250th anniversary, as the oldest, grandest fireworks festival in Japan. The festival spent $400,000 on the hanabi—literally “fire flowers”— alone: 17,500 shells in an hour and 20 minutes, none bigger than four-and-a-half inches in diameter. How many shells is that per minute? [New York Times, July 17, 1983, sect. 10, p. 37]

Every last Saturday in July, colorful fireworks are launched from both sides of the Sumida River. The spectacle is best seen from close to the river, although it can get very crowded, and best spots are often taken hours in advance. Still, the festive atmosphere, with people dressing up in yukata and picnicking in the streets and parks, is worth it.





1985  Julia Robinson died of leukemia. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1948 under the direction of Alfred Tarski, she began work on Hilbert’s tenth problem, the problem which occupied most of her professional life.  
 Robinson was awarded a doctorate in 1948 and that same year started work on Hilbert's Tenth Problem: find an effective way to determine whether a Diophantine equation is soluble. Along with Martin Davis and Hilary Putman she gave a fundamental result which contributed to the solution to Hilbert's Tenth Problem, making what became known as the Robinson hypothesis. She also did important work on that problem with Matijasevic after he gave the complete solution in 1970. *SAU




BIRTHS


1857 Thorstein Bunde Veblen, (July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist, and a leader of the so-called institutional economics movement. Besides his technical work he was a popular and witty critic of capitalism, as shown by his best known book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).





1859 Henry Louis Smith (July 30, 1859–February 17, 1951) was the ninth president of Davidson College and the first president to not be an ordained Presbyterian minister.  

American physicist and administrator who is credited with making the first X-ray photograph in the U.S. on about 12 Jan 1896, while he was a professor of physics and astronomy at Davidson College, North Carolina. Shortly after Röntgen's announcement of his discovery of X-rays, Smith copied the technique. Smith made an X-ray photograph of a bullet he had shot into the hand of a cadaver, that was  published in the Charlotte Observer (27 Feb 1896). Shortly thereafter, he made the first clinical use of X-rays to locate a thimble stuck in a young girl's throat, enabling its surgical removal. Smith became the college president in 1901 and oversaw adding a new science building. He established an electric light plant. Near the end of WW I, his idea to inform the German population of President Wilson's peace plans was adopted. Millions of messages carried by gas-filled balloons were released from France into the winds over Germany. *TiS

*Wik



1863 Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) American inventor and car manufacturer, born in Dearborn, Mich. Ford first experimented with internal combustion engines while he was an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. He completed his first useful gas motor on 24 Dec 1893. The Quadricycle, he designed made its first road test on 4 Jun 1896. In 1903 the Ford Motor Company was incorporated. By 1908, Ford was manufacturing the low cost, reliable Model T, while continuing to revolutionize his industry. Ford introduced precision manufactured parts designed to be standardized and interchangeable parts. In 1913, production was increased using a continuous moving assembly line. By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's.*TIS


1878 Joel Stebbins (July 30, 1878 – March 16, 1966) was an American astronomer who pioneered photoelectric photometry in astronomy.
He earned his Ph.D at the University of California. He was director of University of Illinois observatory from 1903 to 1922 and the Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1922 to 1948. After 1948, Stebbins continued his research at Lick Observatory until his final retirement in 1958.
Stebbins brought photoelectric photometry from its infancy in the early 1900s to a mature technique by the 1950s, when it succeeded photography as the primary method of photometry. Stebbins used the new technique to investigate eclipsing binaries, the reddening of starlight by interstellar dust, colors of galaxies, and variable stars.
Stebbins received the following awards:

Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1913)
Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1915)
Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1941)
Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1950)
Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society (1956)

The Lunar crater Stebbins and the asteroid 2300 Stebbins are named in his honor. *TIA

Joel Stebbins, then a graduate student, at Lick Observatory about 1902 posing next to the 36-inch refractor.




1887 Felix Andries Vening Meinesz (The Hague July 30, 1887 - Amersfoort August 10, 1966) was a Dutch geophysicist and geodesist who was known for his measurements of gravity at sea for which he devised the Vening Meinesz pendulum apparatus with comparable accuracy as on land. Starting in 1923 he conducted several global gravity surveys on voyages on submarines, particularly to and in the Indonesian Archipelago. He detected strong gravity anomaly belts running parallel to the Indonesian deep sea trenches. He explained these Meinesz belts as sites of downbuckling of the Earth's crust. He introduced the concept of regional isostasy taking flexure of an elastic crust into account. He also contributed to physical geodesy: The Vening Meinesz formula connects the deviation of the vertical from the plumbline to gravity anomalies. *TIS

Vening Meinesz with his gravimeter

*Wik



1888 Vladimir Zworykin (July 29 [O.S. July 17] 1888 – July 29, 1982) was born in Russia. After emigrating to Pittsburgh, Zworykin took a job at Westinghouse Electric Corp., where in 1923 he filed a patent for the iconoscope, the first television transmission tube and a technology that was to become of interest to early computer designers. With a later invention, the kinescope, Zworykin was able to create the first all-electric television system. Zworykin took the technology to RCA in 1929, where he continued his work and earned the title "father of television.*CMH





2021  Marion Walter (July 30, 1928 – May 9, 2021) was an internationally-known mathematics educator and professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. 

Marion Ilse Walter was born in Berlin and escaped the Nazis on the Kindertransport to England. She emigrated to the United States in 1948 and after earning her doctorate, founded the Mathematics Department at Simmons College. She published over 40 journal articles, several children's books, and the popular book The Art of Problem Posing.

There is a theorem named after her, called Marion Walter's Theorem or just Marion's Theorem as it is affectionately known.

This theorem, first stated by Walter in 1994, is the following:

Let  ABC be any triangle. Trisect each side, so that AB has C1 and C2  as the two trisection points and similarly for the other two sides. Draw the lines A  A1,  A A2, and similarly lines B B1 , B B2 , C C1, C C2.

These lines define an hexagonal region in the middle of triangleABC. Then the area of the hexagonal region is 1/10 the area of ABC.






1934 Donald Samuel Ornstein (born July 30, 1934, New York) is an American mathematician working in the area of ergodic theory. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1957 under the guidance of Irving Kaplansky. During his career at Stanford University he supervised the Ph. D. thesis of twenty three students, including David H. Bailey, Bob Burton, Doug Lind, Ami Radunskaya, Dan Rudolph, and Jeff Steif.

He is most famous for his work on the isomorphism of Bernoulli shifts, for which he won the 1974 Bôcher Prize. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1981. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. *Wik




DEATHS



1762 William Braikenridge (1700; 30 July 1762 in London, England) was an English clergyman who worked on geometry and discovered independently many of the same results as Maclaurin.*SAU

In geometry the Braikenridge–Maclaurin theorem was independently discovered by Colin Maclaurin. It occasioned a priority dispute after Braikenridge published it in 1733; Stella Mills writes that, while Braikenridge may have wished to establish priority, Maclaurin rather felt slighted by the implication that he did not know theorems in the Exercitatio that he had taught for a number of years. *Wik

In geometry, the Braikenridge–Maclaurin theorem, named for 18th-century British mathematicians William Braikenridge and Colin Maclaurin, is the converse to Pascal's theorem. It states that if the three intersection points of the three pairs of lines through opposite sides of a hexagon lie on a line L, then the six vertices of the hexagon lie on a conic C; the conic may be degenerate, as in Pappus's hexagon theorem.






1832 French chemist John Antoine Chaptal He authored the first book on industrial chemistry, and coined the name "nitrogen". Chaptal also helped improve the technology used to manufacture sulfuric acid, saltpetre for gunpowder, beetroot sugar and wine, amongst other things. *RSC.Org


1978 Rufus Bowen (23 February 1947 - 30 July 1978) worked on dynamical systems. Rufus died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 31. *SAU

In 1970, Bowen completed his doctorate in Mathematics at Berkeley under Stephen Smale, and joined the faculty as assistant professor in that year. At this time he began calling himself Rufus, the nickname he had been given because of his red hair and beard.  He was an invited speaker at the 1974 International Mathematical Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.He was promoted to full professorship in 1977.
Bowen's mature work dealt with dynamical systems theory, a field which Smale, Bowen's dissertation advisor, explored and broadened in the 1960s.




1985 Julia Robinson (December 8, 1919 – July 30, 1985) died of leukemia. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1948 under the direction of Alfred Tarski, she began work on Hilbert’s tenth problem, the problem which occupied most of her professional life.*VFR She also worked on computability, decision problems and non-standard models of arithmetic. *SAU Her sister was Constance Reid who wrote biographies of several mathematicians and several popular math books.

Julia Robinson's Job Description:

Monday: Try to prove theorem

Tuesday: Try to prove theorem

Wednesday: Try to prove theorem

Thursday: Try to prove theorem

Friday: Theorem false


Elizabeth Scott in a tribute to Robinson,




1993 Jeremiah Certaine (6 June 1920, 30 July 1993) was an African American mathematician who was awarded a Ph.D. by Harvard University for a thesis on algebra in 1945. He taught at Howard University for a few years but for most of his career he was an applied mathematician for Nuclear Development Associates and the United Nuclear Corporation.

Certaine was awarded a B.A. by Temple University in 1940 and was accepted to continue studying mathematics at Temple University for a Master's Degree which he was awarded in 1941, After the award of his Master's Degree, Certaine went to Harvard University where he began research advised by Garrett Birkhoff. In 1942-43 he was a member of the Harvard Math Club and presented the paper Groups as algebras of a single operation at one of its meetings. 

In 1945 Certaine was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard University for his 69-page thesis Lattice-Ordered Groupoids and Some Related Problems. *SAU


2002 Dr. Lyle B. Borst, (Nov 24, 1912 - July 30, 2002) was a nuclear physicist who helped build Brookhaven National Laboratory's nuclear reactor and was an early member of the Manhattan Project.
In 1950, Dr. Borst led the construction of the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor, which was the largest and most powerful reactor in the country and the first to be built solely for research and other peacetime uses of atomic energy.
Within the first nine months of operating the reactor, Dr. Borst announced that it had produced a new type of radioactive iodine, which is used in treating thyroid cancer.
In 1952, based on studies of new types of atomic nuclei created in the reactor, Dr. Borst helped explain the mystery behind giant stars, known as supernovae, that burst with the energy of billions of atomic bombs and flare for several years with the brilliance of several million suns.
Dr. Borst found that beryllium 7, an isotope of beryllium that does not occur naturally on earth, is formed in supernovae by the fusion of two helium nuclei. The fusion takes place after the star has used up its hydrogen supply. This reaction absorbs huge quantities of energy, causing the star to collapse in the greatest cosmic explosion known. *NY Times obit.



2016 András Hajnal (May 13, 1931 - July 30, 2016 ) is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences known for his work in set theory and combinatorics. Hajnal is the author of over 150 publications. Among the many co-authors of Paul Erdős, he has the second largest number of joint papers, 56. With Peter Hamburger, he wrote a textbook, Set Theory

In 1992, Hajnal was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of the Republic of Hungary. In 1999, a conference in honor of his 70th birthday was held at DIMACS, and a second conference honoring the 70th birthdays of both Hajnal and Vera Sós was held in 2001 in Budapest. Hajnal became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.*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


Monday, 29 July 2024

On This Day in Math - July 29

 



To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be
no more than asking him to perform a postmortem examination:
he may be able to say what the experiment died of.

~Ronald Fisher

The 210th Day of the Year
210 is the last year day that is a Primorial, 210 = 7# = 7*5*3*2. The name "primorial", coined by Harvey Dubner, draws an analogy to primes similar to the way the name "factorial" relates to factors.*Wikipedia Of course that means it is the smallest number that is the product of four distinct primes, and the only such year date.

210 is a Harshad (joy-giver) number, divisible by the sum of its digits.  In fact, it is a multiple Harshad number since 210/3 = 70, which is also a Harshad number.

(21, 20, 29) and (35, 12, 37) are the two least primitive Pythagorean triangles with different hypotenuses and the same area (=210). Students are challenged to find another pair of such PPTs

There are an infinite number of numbers that appear six or more times in Pascal's Arithmetic Triangle, but only three of them; 1, 120, and 210 are year dates.

7! hours is 210 days.

The Combination of ten things taken four at a time is 210. It is also C(21,2)

13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 = 210, the sum of eight consecutive primes

210 is the 20th Triangular number, the sum of the integers from 1 - 20.

210 is the last year date which is both a triangular number and the product of consecutive numbers, 14 x 15.  It is also the last to be the product of three consecutive numbers,  5 x 6 X 7. 

Three different ways to make a 3x3 magic square with a magic constant of 210, Take the classic 3x3 and multiply each term by 14,
56 126 28
42 70 98
112 14 84

Or with consecutive integers starting at 76

69 74 67
68 70 72
73 66 71

Or maybe with increments of five

65 90 55
60 70 80
85 50 75

The magic is in the middle, all else stems from there.

210 in binary is a balanced number, with the same numbers of ones and zeros, and reading from left to right the zeros never outnumber the ones.
 
The sum of the squares of the divisors of 12, is 210.


EVENTS

1654 Pascal wrote a letter to Fermat agreeing to a result of Fermat on a probability problem about repeated rolls of a single die for a wager. "Impatience has seized me as well as it has you, and although I am still abed, I cannot refrain from telling you that I received your letter in regard to the problem of the points  yesterday evening from the hands of M. Carcavi, and that I admire it more than I can tell you. I do not have the leisure to write at length, but, in a word, you have found the two divisions of the points and of the dice with perfect justice. I am thoroughly satisfied as I can no longer doubt that I was wrong, seeing the admirable accord in which I find myself with you."  *York Univ Hist of Stats  



1698 In a letter to John Bernoulli, Leibniz introduces the dot for multiplication..(cajori 233; vol 1 pg 267) “The dot was introduced as a symbol for multiplication by G. W. Leibniz. On July 29, 1698, he wrote in a letter to John Bernoulli: “I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x; … often I simply relate two quantities by an interposed dot and indicate multiplication by ZC · LM. Hence, in designating ratio I use not one point but two points, which I use at the same time for division.”

Cajori shows the symbol as a raised dot. However, according to Margherita Barile, consulting Gerhardt's edition of Leibniz's Mathematische Schriften (G. Olms, 1971), the dot is never raised, but is located at the bottom of the line. She writes that the non-raised dot as a symbol for multiplication appears in all the letters of 1698, and earlier, and, according to the same edition, it already appears in a letter by Johann Bernoulli to Leibniz dated September, 2nd 1694. 

The dot was used earlier by Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) in Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas, which was published posthumously in 1631, and by Thomas Gibson in 1655 in Syntaxis mathematica. However Cajori says, "it is doubtful whether Harriot or Gibson meant these dots for multiplication. They are introduced without explanation. It is much more probable that these dots, which were placed after numerical coefficients, are survivals of the dots habitually used in old manuscripts and in early printed books to separate or mark off numbers appearing in the running text" (Cajori vol. 1, page 268).

However, Scott (page 128) writes that Harriot was "in the habit of using the dot to denote multiplication." And Eves (page 231) writes, "Although Harriot on occasion used the dot for multiplication, this symbol was not prominently used until Leibniz adopted it."

The colon (:) was used in 1633 in a text entitled Johnson Arithmetik; In two Bookes (2nd ed.: London, 1633). However Johnson only used the symbol to indicate fractions (for example three-fourths was written 3:4); he did not use the symbol for division "dissociated from the idea of a fraction" (Cajori vol. 1, page 276).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) used : for both ratio and division in 1684 in the Acta eruditorum .


Use of decimal point and comma around the world

Blue - decimal point, Lt Gr - comma,  Dk Green - both, Red - Arabic decimal separator, Gray - no data

*Wik



1739 D’Alembert, age 21, submitted his first mathematical paper to the Academy of Sciences. *VFR As his knowledge of mathematics was mainly due to self-study, he often found that others had already established his mathematical discoveries by more elegant and more direct means. In 1739 d’Alembert submitted his first paper to the French Académie Royale des Sciences, in which he described the errors found in the standard textbook, Analyse démontrée, written by Charles Reyneau. *webpage of Robert Nowland




1773 First schoolhouse West of the Alleghenies.*VFR (built in Schoenbrunn, OH.)

The first schoolhouse west of the Alleghenies was built by a band of Moravian missionaries that had come to Ohio to establish a community to minister to the Lenape (Delaware) Indians. The band was led by David Zeisberger who believed everyone had the right to an education. He translated the Bible in the Lenape language and opened the Christian school to teach white and native children alike. School was taught in German, the Moravian native language, and the Lenape languague.

In colonial times, most schools did not teach boys and girls together. Girls from prosperious families went to seperate schools that taught home-making skills. Public schools didn't allow girls to attend. Puritans believed in teaching girls how to read so they could learn Scripture, but that was as far as their formal education would get. Educated girls were considered to not be suitable wives. Schools where blacks and native Americans attended with white children were unheard of although there were some Quaker and missionary schools that taught black and native Americans.

The Schoenbrunn School bucked all of these colonial traditions. In Moravian schools, blacks, native Americans, and girls were taught together with white boys. The Moravians believed that all children should receive an education so they could study the Bible and minister to others. Schoenbrunn School was one of the first public schools in the United States to do this.


HHHistory.com



On this day in 1808, François Arago *escaped* from prison in Mallorca where he had been imprisoned as a spy, and started his journey back to France carrying his logbook of measurements of the meridian. After some misadventures he reached France 11 months later.

On 3 September 1806 Arago and Biot set out for Spain. They continued the task which Méchain had been undertaking on his final expedition and by 1808 they were on Mallorca, an important point which allowed the Paris meridian to be continued south of Barcelona. They had been operating in Spain at an extremely difficult time, given that they were French. Napoleon had turned his attention towards Spain and Portugal in 1807 and marched his armies through Spain to Portugal in October 1807. They conquered Portugal and occupied parts of Spain. In May 1808 Napoleon declared his brother Joseph Bonaparte as Spanish ruler and the War of Independence began. Biot and Arago must have looked extremely suspicious; two Frenchmen with sophisticated measuring instruments working on Spanish territory. Biot fled back to France but Arago remained on Mallorca, disguised as a Spaniard, trying to complete his measurements which he had recorded in a logbook. However lighting of fires on the top of Mount Galatzo was pretty suspicious so he was arrested as a spy and put in prison.

Arago managed to persuade the commander of the prison that he was a scientist, not a spy, and the commander agreed to give Arago a chance to escape. He did so on 29 July 1808 and, still carrying his precious logbook, managed to find a fishing boat heading for Algiers, which he boarded. Reaching Algiers on 3 August he went to the French consul who supplied him with a forged Austrian passport and by 16 August he was on a boat heading to Marseille. This might have been a remarkable adventure had it ended at that point, but more drama was to come. The boat on which Arago was sailing was captured while on its way to France by a Spanish warship and he was back in captivity again. Arago was held in a Spanish prison in Roses but after only a short spell the Spanish decided to send their prisoners to Palamos since the French armies were advancing through Spain. However Arago was lucky and, having been recognized by the authorities, was released an put on another boat for Marseille on 28 November.

It was not to be, however, for again Arago failed to reach his homeland. A storm blew the boat back to Bougie on the north African coast where he was captured by Muslims. After further adventures during which he persuaded his captors that he wished to convert to Islam to obtain favorable treatment, he was allowed to return to Algiers which he did overland, arriving there on 25 December. A new local leader in Algiers was opposed to the French and Arago found himself in prison waiting to be shipped off to a penal colony. However the French consul again came to his rescue and, on 21 June 1809, Arago was put, for the third time, on a ship bound for Marseille. This time he reached his destination without mishap and on 2 July 1809 he was standing on French soil.

Arago's grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris *SAU

1867 Thomas Hill, president of Harvard College, who was also somewhat of a mathematician, wrote Benjamin Peirce, who was a professor there: “I have the honor of informing you that the University, on Commencement Day, conferred on you the Degree of Doctor of Laws in recognition of the transcendent ability with which you have pursued mathematical physical investigations, and in particular for the luster which she has herself for so many years borrowed from your genius.” [P. 10 of Benjamin Peirce, AMM offprint, 1925] *VFR

Hill was president of Antioch College from 1860 to 1862 until the Civil War forced the college to shut down; he then held the presidency of Harvard University from 1862 to 1868. *PB Notes




1878 This was the height of search for the intra-Mercurial planet Vulcan using eclipses to block the Sun. (Vulcan was a small planet proposed to exist in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. In an attempt to explain peculiarities of Mercury's orbit, in the 19th-century French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier hypothesized that they were the result of another planet, which he named Vulcan.) Several observers claim sightings, but they are never confirmed. The problem is finally resolved by Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in his general theory of relativity in 1916. *NSEC

Vulcan in a lithographic map from 1846 *Wik



In 1890, Laroy Sunderland Starrett received a U.S. patent for his micrometer screw guage (No. 433,311), which is the form still familiar and indispensible to any machinist or person measuring small objects in a physics lab. Since 1881, he had worked to improve the micrometers then existing. His design had a vernier scale, a smaller head, a locking device and a small knob extending from the barrel to enable quick rotation while closing the initial gap to the inserted object being measured. By 1899, his micrometer was available in a one-inch size for $6.50, including a leather case. He took out many other patents for the tools he invented or improved, and established a substantial tool manufacturing business. *TiS  

Yep, had a hand full of these in my day.Couldn't afford them today.




1958 President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act. NASA opened for business on 1 October 1958, and within a week launched Project Mercury—the start of the U.S. manned space program. *VFR


2005, another candidate for tenth planet was announced by Mike Brown of California Institute of Technology. Its diameter is estimated at 2,100 miles - about 1-1/2 times that of Pluto. Its orbit is eccentric and inclined at about 45 degrees to the main plane of the solar system. It was named 2003 UB313 on a photograph made 31 Oct 2003. Later, its motion was recognized, on 8 Jan 2005. With orbits significantly inclined to the others, the status as a planet of either or even Pluto, is a subject for debate. They are in a region of numerous frozen comet-like objects beyond Neptune - the Kuiper Belt. The object Sedna - somewhat smaller than Pluto - was also found there in 2004. NASA also in an official statement referred to 2003 UB313 as a tenth planet*TIS






2015 On July 29, 2015, a 15th type of pentagon that would tile the plane was announced by Casey Mann, Jennifer McLoud, and David Von Derau of the University of Washington Bothell. In 1918, K. Reinhardt discovered five different families of convex pentagons that could tile the plane. This was the complete list until 1968, when Richard Kershner wrote about three more families of tiling pentagons. Martin Gardner wrote about the complete list of eight tiling pentagons in 1975, and then got a message from Richard James III about another type. Martin updated the readers of Mathematical Games, but then got a message from a housewife with no mathematical training, Marjorie Rice, who found four more families of tiling pentagons. In 1985, Rolf Stein found a convex pentagon that can tile the plane. Now, there is one more. *Wolfram

*guardian.com


BIRTHS


1858 Francesco Gerbaldi (29 July 1858, La Spezia, Italy to 29 June 1934, Pavia, Italy) was an Italian geometer, who proved Gerbaldi's theorem. In geometry, Gerbaldi's theorem, proved by Gerbaldi (1882), states that one can find six pairwise apolar linearly independent nondegenerate ternary quadratic forms. These are permuted by the Valentiner group. (say that three times real fast) *Wik


1862 Eduard Brückner (July 29, 1862–May 20, 1927) pioneer climate researcher. He also studied the glaciers of the Alps and particularly the effect of the ice ages on the Earth's surface features. By analyzing direct and indirect observations of climatic fluctuations, he discovered the 35-year Brückner climatic cycle (1887) of swings between damp-cold and warm-dry conditions. He initiated scientific debate on whether climate change should be interpreted as a natural function of the Earth system, or whether it was influenced by man's activities, such as deforestation. He considered the impact of climate change on the balance of power between nations and its economic significance in agricultural productivity, emigration, river transportation and the spreading of diseases.*TIS




1898 Isidor Isaac Rabi (29 July 1898 – 11 January 1988) was an American physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944 for his invention (in 1937) of the atomic and molecular beam magnetic resonance method of measuring magnetic properties of atoms, molecules, and atomic nuclei. He spent most of his life at Columbia University (1929-67), where he performed most of his pioneering research in radar and the magnetic moment associated with electron spin in the 1930s and 1940s. His Nobel-winning work led to the invention of the laser, the atomic clock, and diagnostic uses of nuclear magnetic resonance. He originated the idea for the CERN nuclear research center in Geneva (founded 1954). *TIS

Three Nobel Prize winners in 1962: John Bardeen, Isidor Rabi, and Werner Heisenberg (left to right); the occasion is unknown (Wikimedia commons




1912 Noel Bryan Slater, often cited NB Slater, (1912 in Blackburn , January 31 1973) was a British mathematician and physicist who worked on including statistical mechanics and physical chemistry, and probability theory.*Wik




DEATHS


1781 Johann Kies (September 14, 1713—July 29, 1781) a German astronomer and mathematician. Born in Tübingen, Kies worked in Berlin in 1751 alongside Jérôme Lalande in order to make observations on the lunar parallax in concert with those of Nicolas Louis de Lacaille at the Cape of Good Hope.
From 1742 to 1754, at the recommendation of the mathematician Leonhard Euler, he was made professor of mathematics at Berlin's Academy of Sciences and astronomer at its observatory.
He subsequently taught also at the Collegium of Tübingen. From 1754 to 1755, Kies served as director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg.
Kies was one of the first to propagate Newton's discoveries in Germany, and dedicated two of his works to the Englishman: De viribus centralibus (Tübingen, 1758) and De lege gravitatis (Tübingen, 1773). Kies is also the author of a work on lunar influences: De influxu lunae in partes terrae mobiles (Tübingen, 1769). He wrote many other works, both in French and in Latin, on astronomy.
Kies corresponded with Euler from 1747 to 1767. Their correspondence consists of 8 letters, all of which were written by Kies.
The crater Kies on the Moon is named in his honor. *TIA




1839 Gaspard de Prony. (July 22, 1755 - July 29, 1839) Cauchy was elected his successor at the Bureau des Longitudes but was not admitted as he refused to take the oath of allegiance. *VFR
In 1793, de Prony began a major task of producing logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the French Cadastre. The effort was begun at the request of the French National Assembly, which, after the French Revolution wanted to bring uniformity to the multiple measurements and standards used throughout the nation. The tables and their production were vast, with values calculated to between fourteen and twenty-nine decimal places. Inspired by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, de Prony divided up the labor, bragging that he "could manufacture logarithms as easily as one manufactures pins." At the top of the organizational hierarchy were scientists and mathematicians who devised the formulas. Next were workers who created the instructions for doing the calculations. At the bottom were about ninety "computers" (as they were called) who were not trained in mathematics, but who followed the instructions."
One of de Prony's important scientific inventions was the 'de Prony brake' which he invented in 1821 to measure the performance of machines and engines. He also was first to propose using a reversible pendulum to measure gravity, which was independently invented in 1817 by Henry Kater and became known as the Kater's pendulum. He also created a method of converting sinusoidal and exponential curves into a systems of linear equations. Prony estimation is used extensively in signal processing and finite element modelling of non linear materials. Prony was a member, and eventually president, of the French Academy of Science. He was also elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1810. His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. *Wik



1898 John Alexander Reina Newlands, (July 22, 1755 - July 29, 1839) was a British chemist who first established an order of elements by the atomic weights, and observed a periodicity in the properties. Every eighth element has similar properties, hence he named the Law of Octaves (7 Feb 1863). It took another quarter century, and the work of others, such as Mendeleev, for the significance of his discovery to be recognized. He died in London.*TIS







1917 Henry Albert Howard Boot (29 July 1917 – 8 February 1983) was an English physicist who with Sir John Randall and James Sayers developed the cavity magnetron, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. *Wik

 “Harry” Boot was an English physicist who worked with John Randall developing the cavity magnetron, the microwave-generating device used in radar. This made a major contribution to winning WWII. Earlier magnetrons made in the 1920s gave low power output. By Feb 1940, advances by Randall and Boot in the design of the small-sized cavity magnetron, produced centimeter wavelengths at much higher power, which allowed radar to detect smaller objects. In turn, this more compact equipment with a smaller antenna permitted easy mobile installation of high-resolution radar in aircraft. *Tis



1944 David Eugene Smith (January 21, 1860 in Cortland, New York – July 29, 1944 in New York) died in New York City at the age of eighty-four.*VFR Smith attended Syracuse University, graduating in 1881 (Ph. D., 1887; LL.D., 1905). He studied to be a lawyer concentrating in arts and humanities, but accepted an instructorship in mathematics at the Cortland Normal School in 1884. He also knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He became a professor at the Michigan State Normal College in 1891, the principal at the State Normal School in Brockport, New York (1898), and a professor of mathematics at Teachers College, Columbia University (1901).
Smith became president of the Mathematical Association of America in 1920. He also wrote a large number of publications of various types. He was editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society; contributed to other mathematical journals; published a series of textbooks; translated Klein's Famous Problems of Geometry, Fink's History of Mathematics, and the Treviso Arithmetic. He edited Augustus De Morgan's Budget of Paradoxes (1915) and wrote many books on Mathematics. *Wik





1962 Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation. Anders Hald called him "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" while Richard Dawkins called him "the greatest of Darwin's successors". In 2010 Dawkins named him "the greatest biologist since Darwin". Fisher was opposed to the conclusions of Richard Doll and A.B. Hill that smoking caused lung cancer. He compared the correlations in their papers to a correlation between the import of apples and the rise of divorce in order to show that correlation does not imply causation.
To quote Yates and Mather, "It has been suggested that the fact that Fisher was employed as consultant by the tobacco firms in this controversy casts doubt on the value of his arguments. This is to misjudge the man. He was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps also the personal solace he had always found in tobacco."
After retiring from Cambridge University in 1957 he spent some time as a senior research fellow at the CSIRO in Adelaide, Australia. He died of colon cancer there in 1962.
He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin–Wallace Medal in 1958.
Fisher's important contributions to both genetics and statistics are emphasized by the remark of L.J. Savage, "I occasionally meet geneticists who ask me whether it is true that the great geneticist R.A. Fisher was also an important statistician"*Wik The stained glass window is from the Greatroom at Caius College.


1994 Dorothy Mary Hodgkin OM FRS (12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994), known professionally as Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin or simply Dorothy Hodgkin, was a British biochemist who developed protein crystallography, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
She advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three-dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin that Ernst Boris Chain and Edward Abraham had previously surmised, and then the structure of vitamin B12, for which she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1969, after 35 years of work and five years after winning the Nobel Prize, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. X-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structures of many biological molecules where knowledge of structure is critical to an understanding of function. She is regarded as one of the pioneer scientists in the field of X-ray crystallography studies of biomolecules. *Wik



1996 Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger (October 24, 1920 – July 29, 1996) was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. His work had impact across the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory. In addition to his formal results in mathematics, he was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of Darwinism," a stance which has resulted in some mixed reactions from his peers and from critics of his stance on evolution. Several notable theorems and objects in mathematics bear his name (for example Schutzenberger group).*Wik




2004 Walter Feit (October 26, 1930 – July 29, 2004)was an Austrian mathematician who (with John Thompson) proved one of the most important theorems about finite simple groups.*SAU

His most famous result is his proof, joint with John G. Thompson, of the Feit–Thompson theorem that all finite groups of odd order are solvable. At the time it was written, it was probably the most complicated and difficult mathematical proof ever completed. He wrote almost a hundred other papers, mostly on finite group theory, character theory (in particular introducing the concept of a coherent set of characters), and modular representation theory. Another regular theme in his research was the study of linear groups of small degree, that is, finite groups of matrices in low dimensions. It was often the case that, while the conclusions concerned groups of complex matrices, the techniques employed were from modular representation theory.

He also wrote the books:The representation theory of finite groups and Characters of finite groups, which are now standard references on character theory, including treatments of modular representations and modular characters.






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