Thanks for the great memories, Students of Lakenheath
Perhaps... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.
~Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
The 238th day of the year; 238 is an untouchable number, The untouchable numbers are those that are not the sum of the proper divisors of any number. 2 and 5 are untouchable, can you find the next one? (four is not untouchable, for example since 1+3=4 and they are the proper divisors of 9) Five is the only known odd untouchable number.
also 238 is also the sum of the first 13 primes, and its digits add up to ........wait for it.... 13 (2+3+8 = 13 and 238 = sum of first 13 primes).
23=8 (We are tentatively calling these "power equation numbers") *Derek Orr
In base 16 238 is a Repdigit, EE (14 x 16 + 14
238 is the number of partitions of 34 into powers of two.And also the same for 35.
6 times 238 is between a pair of twin primes.
1735 Euler’s Konigsburg bridge solution, "The Solution of a problem related to the Geometry of Position", was presented to the St. Petersburg Academy on August 26, 1735. He showed that there were no continuous walks across the seven bridges across the Pregel River in Konigsburg. It is often cited as the earliest paper in both topology and graph theory.*VFR
1768 Capt. James Cook began the first circumnavigation of the globe. *VFR Cook and his ninety-eight foot bark, Endeavour, carried the Venus transit observation crew mounted by the Royal Society, led by a future Royal Soc. President, Joseph Banks. They would erect an observation station at Point Venus in Tahiti to observe the June 3, 1769 observation under clear blue skis. *Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way
The view from Point Venus, Tahiti, where Cook and his men observed the transit of Venus.
1770 Lagrange, in a letter to d’Alembert, first uses the notation f‘ (x) for the derivative. In 1770 Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) wrote :
for in his memoir Nouvelle méthode pour résoudre les équations littérales par le moyen des séries (Oeuvres, Vol. III, pp. 5-76). The notation also occurs in a memoir by François Daviet de Foncenex in 1759 believed actually to have been written by Lagrange (Cajori 1919, page 256).
In 1772 Lagrange wrote and in "Sur une nouvelle espèce de calcul relatif à la différentiation et à l'integration des quantités variables," Nouveaux Memoires de l'Academie royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Berlin (Oeuvres, Vol. III, pp. 451-478).
it did not catch on until after he used it in his Theorie de functions analytiques (1797). *Oeuvres de Lagrange, 13, p. 181.
'(x) for the first derivative, f''(x) for the second derivative, etc., were introduced by Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813). In 1797 in Théorie des fonctions analytiques the symbols f'x and f''x are found; in the Oeuvres, Vol. X, "which purports to be a reprint of the 1806 edition, on p. 15, 17, one finds the corresponding parts given as f(x), f'(x), f''(x), f'''(x)" (Cajori vol. 2, page 207).
1774 John Adams notes in his diary that he had toured Princeton’s library with Professor Euston (William Churchill Houston, first professor of mathematics and natural philosophy) and then into the “apparatus room” where he saw the “most beautiful machine”. It was an orrery made by David Rittenhouse, a renowned American astronomer, inventor, clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman and public official. Professor Houston served in combat in the revolution when Princeton was closed by the occupation of the British. After the college was reopened, he returned to teaching but was soon selected to represent New Jersey as a representative to the Continental Congress, and then to the Constitutional Convention. He died shortly after the close of the Constitutional Convention. *The Teaching and History of Mathematics in The United States, F. Cajori (pgs 71-72)
1831 Darwin had been committed to a life as a clergyman when he received a letter from George Peacock inviting him to sail with Captain Fitzroy. The rest, as they say, is history.
My dear Sir
I received Henslow’s (Darwin's botany professor) letter last night too late to forward it to you by the post, a circumstance which I do not regret, as it has given me an opportunity of seeing Captain Beaufort at the admiralty (the Hydrographer) & of stating to him the offer which I have to make to you: he entirely approves of it & you may consider the situation as at your absolute disposal: I trust that you will accept it as it is an opportunity which should not be lost & I look forward with great interest to the benefit which our collections of natural history may receive from your labours
The circumstances are these
Captain Fitzroy (a nephew of the Duke of Graftons) sails at the end of September in a ship to survey in the first instance the S. Coast of Terra del Fuego, afterwards to visit the South Sea Islands & to return by the Indian Archipelago to England: The expedition is entirely for scientific purposes & the ship will generally wait your leisure for researches in natural history &c: Captain Fitzroy is a public spirited & zealous officer, of delightful manners & greatly beloved by all his brother officers: he went with Captain Beechey and spent 1500£ in bringing over and educating at his own charge 3 natives of Patagonia:f2 he engages at his own expense an artist at 200 a year to go with him: you may be sure therefore of having a very pleasant companion, who will enter heartily into all your views
The ship sails about the end of September you must lose no time in making known your acceptance to Captain Beaufort, Admiralty hydr I have had a good deal of correspondence about this matter, who feels in common with myself the greatest anxiety that you should go. I hope that no other arrangements are likely to interfere with it
Captain will give you the rendezvous & all requisite information: I should recommend you to come up to London, in order to see him & to complete your arrangements I shall leave London on Monday: perhaps you will have the goodness to write to me at Denton, Darlington, to say that you will go.
The Admiralty are not disposed to give a salary, though they will furnish you with an official appointment; & every accommodation: if a salary should be required however I am inclined to think that it would be granted
Believe me | My dear Sir | Very truly yours | Geo Peacock
If you are with Sedgwick I hope you will give my kind regards to him
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| G Peacock |
1835 The Great Moon Hoax articles began in the New York Sun. The post described supposed observations reported by John Herschel, who had taken his large telescope to the Cape of Good Hope. The articles described animals on the Moon, including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal beavers without tails, and winged humanoid creatures who walked with grace when landed on the surface.There were trees, oceans and beaches. These discoveries were supposedly made with "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle". *Wik
In 1883, Mount Krakatoa, an island volcano in the Dutch Indies (now Indonesia) erupted with violent explosions that destroyed two thirds of the island. It produced huge tsunami waves that swept across the immediate region, killing an estimated 36,000 people. These waves were powerful enough to cross the Indian Ocean and travel beyond Cape Horn. The most powerful blast was the most violent known in human history—it was loud enough to be heard in Australia. The shockwave was registered by barometers England. The huge amount of volcanic dust thrust high into the stratosphere eventually travelled around the world. The dust blocked sunlight causing temperature drops, highly coloured sunsets, and chaotic weather patterns for several years afterwards.
An 1888 lithograph of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa
In 1895, electricity was first transmitted commercially from the first large-scale utilization of Niagara Falls power, the current being used by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in the electrolytic production of aluminium metal from its ore. Buffalo subsequently received power for commercial use on 15 Nov 1896. The equipment was the result of a contract made on 24 Oct 1893 whereby Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh, Pa., would install three 5,000-hp generators producing two-phase currents at 2,200 volts, 25 hertz. The first such turboalternator unit was completed within 18 months. Prior capacity had been limited to generators no larger than 1,000 hp.*TIS
Nikola Tesla statue and arch entrance of 1895 Powerhouse No. 1 on Goat Island
In February 1950, Hodgson took Silly Putty to the International Toy Fair in New York, but most people there did not see the potential for the new toy. Luckily, Hodgson did manage to get Silly Putty stocked at both Nieman-Marcus and Doubleday bookstores.
A few months later, a reporter for The New Yorker stumbled across Silly Putty at a Doubleday bookstore and took home an egg. Fascinated, the writer wrote an article in the "Talk of the Town" section that appeared on August 26, 1950. Immediately, orders for Silly Putty started pouring in.
1966 Professor Stephen Smale, who received the Fields medal ten days earlier, condemned American military intervention in Vietnam and Soviet intervention in Hungary at a news conference in Moscow. For Smale’s fascinating personal account see “On the Steps of Moscow University,” The Mathematical Intelligencer, 6, no. 2, pp. 21–27. *VFR
1984 Miss Manners addresses computer correspondence
Miss Manners confronts a new realm of etiquette in her August 26 column as she responded to a reader's concern about typing personal correspondence on a personal computer. The concerned individual said that using the computer was more convenient but that they were worried about the poor quality of her dot-matrix printer and about copying parts of one letter into another.
Miss Manners replied that computers, like typewriters, generally are inappropriate for personal correspondence. In the event a word processor is used, she warned, the recipient may confuse the letter for a sweepstakes entry. And, she noted, if any one of your friends ever sees that your letter to another contains identical ingredients, you have will no further correspondence problems.*CHM
2005 Two scientists from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris published a paper in Physical Review Letters with the title: "Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half," to answer that nagging question of all Italian cooks: why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces. A popular anecdote says that Richard Feynman had pondered the question without solution. *Improbable Research
Feynman’s kitchen experiment remained unresolved until 2005, when physicists from France pieced together a theory to describe the forces at work when spaghetti — and any long, thin rod — is bent. They found that when a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a “snap-back” effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick. Their theory, which won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, seemed to solve Feynman’s puzzle. But a question remained: Could spaghetti ever be coerced to break in two?
The answer, according to a new MIT study, is yes — with a twist. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have found a way to break spaghetti in two, by both bending and twisting the dry noodles. They carried out experiments with hundreds of spaghetti sticks, bending and twisting them with an apparatus they built specifically for the task. The team found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.
1728 Johann Heinrich Lambert (August 26, 1728 – September 25, 1777) was born in Mulhouse, Alsace. His most famous results are the proofs of the irrationality of π and e *VFR In 1766, Lambert wrote Theorie der Parallellinien, a study of the parallel postulate. By assuming that the parallel postulate was false, he deduced many non-euclidean results. He noticed that in this new geometry the sum of the angles of a triangle increases as its area decreases. Lambert conjectured that e and p are transcendental, though this was not proved for another century. He is responsible for many innovations in the study of heat and light, devised a method of measuring light intensity, as well as working on the theory of probability.*TIS (Lambert's credit for a vigorous proof of the irrationality of π is generally agreed to, but Euler Scholar Ed Sandifer has written that Euler's proof was fully rigorous prior to Lambert. *How Euler Did It, Feb 2006).
1740 Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (26 Aug 1740; 26 Jun 1810)French balloon pioneer, with his younger brother, Étienne. An initial experiment with a balloon of taffeta filled with hot smoke was given a public demonstration on 5 Jun 1783. This was followed by a flight carrying three animals as passengers on 19 Sep 1783, shown in Paris and witnessed by King Louis XVI. On 21 Nov 1783, their balloon carried the first two men on an untethered flight. In the span of one year after releasing their test balloon, the Montgolfier brothers had enabled the first manned balloon flight in the world.*TIS
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| Jacques Louis David |
"This great double portrait at right was painted when the artist, at the peak of his powers, had become the standard-bearer of French Neoclassicism. Lavoisier is known for his pioneering studies of oxygen, gunpowder, and the chemical composition of water. In 1789 he published a treatise on chemistry illustrated by his wife, who is believed to have been David's pupil." *Metropolitan Museum of Art
1857 Ida Martha Metcalf (August 26, 1857 – October 24, 1952) was the second American woman to receive a PhD in mathematics. She was born in Texas to Charles A. and Martha C. (Williams) Metcalf. During her youth, her family moved about the south. After her father’s death, she moved to New England with her mother and siblings. By 1870, she was living in Massachusetts, where she taught school for many years.
In 1883, Ida began studying at Boston University where she received a Bachelor’s in Philosophy (Ph.B.) in 1886. From 1888 to 1889, she was a graduate student at Cornell University, earning a master's degree in mathematics. After teaching at Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, she returned to Cornell and receive her Ph.D. in 1893.
For many years after receiving her Ph.D., Ida taught high school and worked in several financial firms and as a Civil Service Examiner. In 1912, she became a statistician in the Department of Finance for New York City, where she remained until her retirement in 1921.
After retirement, Ida continued to work intermittently as a Civil Service Examiner until 1939. Beginning with the onset of a serious illness in 1948, she lived in nursing homes until her death at the age of ninety-six.*Wik
1873 Lee de Forest (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor and a fundamentally important early pioneer in electronics. He invented the first practical electronic amplifier, the three-element "Audion" triode vacuum tube in 1906. This helped start the Electronic Age, and enabled the development of the electronic oscillator. These made radio broadcasting and long distance telephone lines possible, and led to the development of talking motion pictures, among countless other applications.
He had over 300 patents worldwide, but also a tumultuous career – he boasted that he made, then lost, four fortunes. He was also involved in several major patent lawsuits, spent a substantial part of his income on legal bills, and was even tried (and acquitted) for mail fraud.
Despite this, he was recognised for his pioneering work with the 1922 IEEE Medal of Honor, the 1923 Franklin Institute Elliott Cresson Medal and the 1946 American Institute of Electrical Engineers Edison Medal. *Wik
1875 Giuseppe Vitali (26 August 1875 – 29 February 1932) was an Italian mathematician who worked in several branches of mathematical analysis. He was the first to give an example of a non-measurable subset of real numbers, see Vitali set. His covering theorem is a fundamental result in measure theory. He also proved several theorems concerning convergence of sequences of measurable and holomorphic functions. Vitali convergence theorem generalizes Lebesgue's dominated convergence theorem. Another theorem bearing his name gives a sufficient condition for the uniform convergence of a sequence of holomorphic functions on an open domain D⊂ℂ to a holomorphic function on D. This result has been generalized to normal families of meromorphic functions, holomorphic functions of several complex variables, and so on. *Wik
1882 James Franck (26 Aug 1882; 21 May 1964) German-born American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 with Gustav Hertz for research on the excitation and ionization of atoms by electron bombardment that verified the quantized nature of energy transfer.*TIS
In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, Franck, being a Jew, decided to leave his post in Germany and continued his research in the United States, first at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and then, after a year in Denmark, in Chicago. It was there that he became involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II; he was Director of the Chemistry Division of the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. He was also the chairman of the Committee on Political and Social Problems regarding the atomic bomb; the committee consisted of himself and other scientists at the Met Lab, including Donald J. Hughes, J. J. Nickson, Eugene Rabinowitch, Glenn T. Seaborg, J. C. Stearns and Leó Szilárd. The committee is best known for the compilation of the Franck Report, finished on 11 June 1945, which recommended not to use the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities, based on the problems resulting from such a military application.*Wik
1899 Wolfgang Krull (26 August 1899 - 12 April 1971) proved the Krull-Schmidt theorem for decomposing abelian groups and defined the Krull dimension of a ring.*SAU
1918 Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va {pop 800)- Feb 24, 1980) is an American physicist, space scientist, and mathematician who contributed to America's aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA.
As the small town she was born in had no schools for blacks beyond the eighth grade, her father sent her and her siblings to Institute, West Virginia, for high school. She graduated from the historically black West Virginia State College and taught at black public schools before becoming one of three black students to integrate West Virginia graduate schools in 1939.
Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, she calculated the trajectory for Project Mercury and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon. From 1953 through 1958, Johnson worked as a "computer" for NACA (later to become NASA), doing analysis for topics such as gust alleviation for aircraft. She calculated the trajectory for the space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, in 1959. She also calculated the launch window for his 1961 Mercury mission. She plotted backup navigational charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures. In 1962, when NASA used computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit around Earth, officials called on her to verify the computer's numbers (other versions say it was Glenn himself who requested she check the data).
On November 24, 2015, President Barack Obama her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and cited as a pioneering example of African American women in STEM *Wik NASA announced her death at 101 on Feb 24, 2020.
1924 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.
1951 Edward Witten (26 Aug 1951, )American mathematical physicist who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1990 for his work in superstring theory. This is work in elementary particle theory, especially quantum field theory and string theory, and their mathematical implications. He elucidated the dynamics of strongly coupled supersymmetric field. The deep physical and mathematical consequences of the electric-magnetic duality thus exploited have broadened the scope of Mathematical Physics. He also received the Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (1985) and the Dannie Heineman Prize from the American Physical Society (1998), among others.*TIS
1965 Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy OBE FRS (26 August 1965, ) is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and author of popular mathematics and popular science books. *Wik
Du Sautoy is familiar on broadcast media, and has written many popular articles in various print media and online. His research activities are mainly in group theory, number theory and exploring the mathematics of symmetry, on which he has published numerous academic articles. The several popular books he has written includeThe Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics(2012) andThe Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science(2017).*TiS
1349 Thomas Bradwardine, (c. 1290-26 August 1349) archbishop of Canterbury, died of the plague. This medieval mathematical physicist studied the notion of change. *VFR Bradwardine was a noted mathematician as well as theologian and was known as 'the profound doctor'. He studied bodies in uniform motion and ratios of speed in the treatise De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (1328). This work takes a rather strange line between supporting and criticising Aristotle's physics. Perhaps it is not really so strange because Aristotle views were so fundamental to learning at that time that perhaps all that one could expect of Bradwardine was the reinterpretation of Aristotle's views on bodies in motion and forces acting on them. It is likely that his intention was not to criticise Aristotle but rather to justify mathematically a reinterpretation of Aristotle's statements. He was also the first mathematician to study "star polygons". They were later investigated more thoroughly by Kepler *SAU A star polygon {p/q}, with p,q positive integers, is a figure formed by connecting with straight lines every qth point out of p regularly spaced points lying on a circumference. The number q is called the density of the star polygon. Without loss of generality, take q less than p/2. *Wolfram MathWorld
1572 Peter Ramus (1515 – 26 August 1572) was cruelly murdered, by hired assassins, during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. He was an early opponent of the teachings of Aristotle. *VFR Peter Ramus was a French mathematician who wrote a whole series of textbooks on logic and rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, astronomy, and optics. His assassination was due to religious conflict.
1632 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (24 Oct 1632; 26 Aug 1723.) Dutch microscopist who was the first to observe bacteria and protozoa. His researches on lower animals refuted the doctrine of spontaneous generation, and his observations helped lay the foundations for the sciences of bacteriology and protozoology.*TIS "The 31th of May, I perceived in the same water more of those Animals, as also some that were somewhat bigger. And I imagine, that [ten hundred thousand] of these little Creatures do not equal an ordinary grain of Sand in bigness: And comparing them with a Cheese-mite (which may be seen to move with the naked eye) I make the proportion of one of these small Water-creatures to a Cheese-mite, to be like that of a Bee to a Horse: For, the circumference of one of these little Animals in water, is not so big as the thickness of a hair in a Cheese-mite. "
mentioned the death to be 26 or 28 August 1865. *NSEC
Following a suggestion by Jean-Louis Pons, who suspected one of the three comets discovered in 1818 to be the same one already discovered by him in 1805, Encke began to calculate the orbital elements of this comet. At this time, all the known comets had an orbital period of seventy years and more, with an aphelion far beyond the orbit of Uranus. The most famous comet of this family was Comet Halley with its period of seventy-six years. Therefore the orbit of the comet discovered by Pons was a sensation, because his orbit was found to have a period of 3.3 years, so that the aphelion had to be within the orbit of Jupiter. Encke predicted its return for 1822; this return was observable only from the southern hemisphere and was seen by Carl Ludwig Christian Rümker in Australia. The comet was also identified with the one seen by Pierre Méchain in 1786 and by Caroline Herschel in 1795. *Wik
1923 Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton (28 April 1854 – 26 August 1923), was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist, and inventor. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.
In 1880, Ayrton passed the Mathematical Tripos, but Cambridge did not grant her an academic degree because, at the time, Cambridge gave only certificates and not full degrees to women. Ayrton passed an external examination at the University of London, which awarded her a Bachelor of Science degree in 1881.
In 1899, she was the first woman ever to read her own paper before the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). Her paper was entitled "The Hissing of the Electric Arc". Shortly thereafter, Ayrton was elected the first female member of the IEE; the next woman to be admitted to the IEE was in 1958. She petitioned to present a paper before the Royal Society but was not allowed because of her sex and "The Mechanism of the Electric Arc" was read by John Perry in her stead in 1901. Ayrton was also the first woman to win a prize from the Society, the Hughes Medal, awarded to her in 1906 in honour of her research on the motion of ripples in sand and water and her work on the electric arc. By the late nineteenth century, Ayrton's work in the field of electrical engineering was recognised more widely, domestically and internationally. At the International Congress of Women held in London in 1899, she presided over the physical science section. Ayrton also spoke at the International Electrical Congress in Paris in 1900. Her success there led the British Association for the Advancement of Science to allow women to serve on general and sectional committees. *Wik
Today, Bromwich is perhaps best known for justifying Oliver Heaviside's operator calculus. Part of this involved using a contour integral to do an inverse Laplace transform. This particular contour integral is now often called the Bromwich integral, although it is also called by other names.
Other topics Bromwich investigated include solutions of the Maxwell's equations, and the scattering of electromagnetic plane waves by spheres. He also investigated, and wrote a book on, the theory of quadratic forms.
In 1906 he derived Bromwich inequality in the field of matrices which gives narrower bounds to characteristic roots than those given by Bendixson's inequality.
In 1908 he wrote An introduction to the theory of infinite series. A second edition appeared in 1926. G. H. Hardy praised the book highly, while criticizing the way in which it was laid out. The book is still in print.[
1961 Howard Percy Robertson (27 Jan 1903 in Hoquiam, Washington, USA - 26 Aug 1961) made outstanding contributions to differential geometry, quantum theory, the theory of general relativity, and cosmology. He was interested in the foundations of physical theories, differential geometry, the theory of continuous groups, and group representations. He was particularly interested in the application of the latter three subjects to physical problems.
His contributions to differential geometry came in papers such as: The absolute differential calculus of a non-Pythagorean non-Riemannian space (1924); Transformation of Einstein space (1925); Dynamical space-times which contain a conformal Euclidean 3-space (1927); Note on projective coordinates (1928); (with H Weyl) On a problem in the theory of groups arising in the foundations of differential geometry (1929); Hypertensors (1930); and Groups of motion in space admitting absolute parallelism (1932). *SAU
1977 Robert Schatten (January 28, 1911 – August 26, 1977) His principal mathematical achievement was that of initiating the study of tensor products of Banach spaces. The concepts of crossnorm, associate norm, greatest crossnorm, least crossnorm, and uniform crossnorm, all either originated with him or at least first received careful study in his papers. He was mainly interested in the applications of this subject to linear transformations on Hilbert space. In this subject, the Schatten Classes perpetuate his name. Schatten had his own way of making abstract concepts memorable to his elementary classes. Who could forget what a sequence was after hearing Schatten describe a long corridor, stretching as far as the eye could see, with hooks regularly spaced on the wall and numbered 1, 2, 3, ...? "Then," Schatten would say, "I come along with a big bag of numbers over my shoulder, and hang one number on each hook." This of course was accompanied by suitable gestures for emphasis. *SAU
1992 Daniel E. Gorenstein (January 1, 1923 – August 26, 1992) was an American mathematician. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1950 under Oscar Zariski, introducing in his dissertation a duality principle for plane curves that motivated Grothendieck's introduction of Gorenstein rings. He was a major influence on the classification of finite simple groups.
After teaching mathematics to military personnel at Harvard before earning his doctorate, Gorenstein held posts at Clark University and Northeastern University before he began teaching at Rutgers University in 1969, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was the founding director of DIMACS in 1989, and remained as its director until his death.
Gorenstein was awarded many honors for his work on finite simple groups. He was recognised, in addition to his own research contributions such as work on signalizer functors, as a leader in directing the classification proof, the largest collaborative piece of pure mathematics ever attempted. In 1972 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar; in 1978 he gained membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1989 won the Steele Prize for mathematical exposition. *Wik
1998 Frederick Reines (16 Mar 1918, 26 Aug 1998) American physicist who was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for his detection in 1956 of neutrinos, working with his colleague Clyde L. Cowan, Jr. The neutrino is a subatomic particle, a tiny lepton with little or no mass and a neutral charge which had been postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in the early 1930s but had previously remained undiscovered. (Reines shared the Nobel Prize with physicist Martin Lewis Perl, who discovered the tau lepton.)*TIS
Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell
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