— Marvin Minsky
The 221st day of the year; 221 the sum of consecutive prime numbers in two different ways 221 = (37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53) = (11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41)
And of course, 221 is the product of consecutive primes, 13 x 17
Because 13 and 17 are both 4n+1 primes, they are the sum of two squares (13= 3^2 + 2^2 and 17 = 4^2 + 1^2), these can be used to construct two ways that 221 can be shown as the sum of two primes. (221 = (3*4+1x2)^2 + (4x2-1x3)^2 = 14^2 + 5^2 and by changing +/- (3x4-1x2)^2 + (4x2+1+3)^2 = 10^2 X 11^2 = 221. Known around 1st century AD by Diophontas.
221221 + 122 is prime, it is the only known number greater than one with this property.
221 is the number of 7-vertex Hamiltonian planar graphs ( a graph that allows a closed path that visits each node exactly once.)
221 is an arithmetic number, the mean of its divisors is a whole number; (1 + 13 + 17 + 221) /4 = 63
See More Math Facts for every Year Day here.
0975 "The Sun was eclipsed . . . . Some people say that it was entirely total. During the hours mao and ch'en (some time between 5 and 9 h) it was all gone. It was the color of ink and without light. All the birds flew about in confusion and the various stars were all visible. There was a general amnesty (on account of the eclipse)." From: Nihon Kiryaku. "At the hour ch'en (7-9 h), the Sun was eclipsed; it was completely total. All under heaven became entirely dark and the stars were all visible."
From: Fuso Ryakki. "The Sun was eclipsed; it was all gone. It was like ink and without light. The stars were all visible (or: stars were visible in the daytime)." From: Hyaku Rensho. These three Japanese quotations refer to a total solar eclipse of 9 August AD 975. Quoted in Historical Eclipses and Earth's Rotation, by F Richard Stephenson, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pages 267 and 268. *NSEC
Night Sky Map view of totality over the US city of Dallas—during the upcoming solar eclipse of April 8, 2024—the Sun is shown to be in front of the constellation Pisces. It forms a nearly straight line with the bright planets Venus (right) and Jupiter (left) in the sky, revealing the path of the ecliptic.
1207 An educational institution is founded for the study of the works of Bhaskara II, an Indian mathematician and astronomer.*VFR
Bhaskara II was rightly achieved an outstanding reputation for his remarkable contribution. In 1207 an educational institution was set up to study Bhaskaracharya's ("Bhaskara the teacher")works. A medieval inscription in an Indian temple reads: Triumphant is the illustrious Bhaskaracharya whose feats are revered by both the wise and the learned. A poet endowed with fame and religious merit, he is like the crest on a peacock. It is from this quotation that the title of Joseph's book comes. *SAU
1654 Fermat to Carcavi "Monsieur, I was overjoyed to have had the same thoughts as those of M. Pascal, for I greatly admire his genius and I believe him to be capable of solving any problem he attempts. The friendship he offers is so dear to me and so precious that I shall not scruple to take advantage of it in publishing an edition of my Treatises. If it does not shock you, you could both help in bringing out this edition, and I suggest that you should be the editors: you could clarify or augment what seems too brief and thus relieve me of a care which my work prevents me from taking. I would like this volume to appear without my name even, leaving to you the choice of designation which would indicate the author, whom you could qualify simply as a friend." *York Univ Hist of Stats.
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1658 Simon Douw obtains a patent for a pendulum clock that will draw Huygen’s attack in Horologium. “Today, no clock by Simon Douw is known; I find that most curious, it is as if he has been excised from history, deliberately. Dutch Court papers described Douw as "City clockmaker of Rotterdam... a master in the art of great tower, domestic or office clocks", ("en meester in de kunst van groote Toorn, Camer ofte Comptoirwerken"). Yet his mechanical insights. his escapement, also his drive mechanisms, are best, and now only, revealed by his Patent Grant on August 9th, 1658, and by the evidence and judgement in a claim and counterclaim started in the Provinces of Holland and West Friesland, but then referred to the Court of The Netherlands in October 1658, with a Judgement by Consent on December 5th, 1658. And that case went entirely in Douw's favor, against the highly favored joint Complainants Huygens and Coster.
In itself, that is remarkable. Huygens, the Noble patrician, the most famous Dutch scientist, and the self-professed inventor of the pendulum clock, who had in the course of this trial published "Horologium"(where he also predicted an easy victory over Douw in the Courts), was forced by the judges to settle the case rather than face unfavorable verdict; also to concede Consent; also one-third Royalties to Douw. It would have been a crushing humiliation for Huygens, the seed of his libels. Subsequently, the Lower Court of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland confirmed to Douw, on December 16th and 19th 1658, their Upper Court's judgement by consent”. * From Keith Piggott
1663 Christiaan Huygens ‘saw performed at Gresham College a notable experiment upon a dog, to which an opening having been made in the body, the whole spleen was cut out, having first joined up the large veins. After the hole was sewn up it went about as if nothing bad had happened; and it is found that they survive very well after despite being deprived of that part.’
*Hugh Aldersey-Williams@HoooAW
1895 Percival Lowell, convinced about intelligent beings on Mars, published an article in The Atlantic Monthly about how lucky they are to have low gravity. "LUCK OF THE BEING WHO LIVES ON MARS; He Can Do More Work Much More Easily than Man on Earth." *HT Paul Halpern @phalpern
1898 Rudolf Diesel patents an internal combustion engine in the US (filed July 15, 1895.) "My invention has reference to improvements in apparatus for regulating the fuel supply in slow-combustion motors" *Google.com
1975 To display Mexican-Lebanese friendship, Mexico issued a stamp of the Teacher’s Monument in Mexico City by I. Naffa al Rozzi, which shows Cadmus, a mythical Phoenician, teaching the alphabet.
Named Al Maestro, meaning The Master, the monument is located at the Papalote Children’s Museum (Papalote Museo del Nino) in Mexico City, and depicts Cadmus and Europa teaching the alphabet to Greek students (and to the world).
1991 First E-mail Sent from Space Using a Mac Portable aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the first e-mail from space is sent to Earth. Two astronauts on the spacecraft, James Adamson and Shannon Lucid, wrote, “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,...send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,...we'll be back!” The message was transmitted to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. *CHM
1537 Franciscus Barocius (9 August 1537 – 23 November 1604) born. In 1560 he published the first important translation of Proclus’ commentary on the first book of Euclid’s Elements. In 1587 he was brought before the Inquisition on charges of sorcery, more particularly of having caused a torrential rainstorm in Crete. *VFR
Barozzi translated many works of the ancients, in addition to Proclus’s edition of Euclid's Elements (published in Venice in 1560), as well as mathematical works by Hero, Pappus of Alexandria, and Archimedes.
He also wrote Rythmomachia (1572), a work that is based on the mathematical game of the same name, also known as "The Philosophers' Game."
Rithmomachia is an early European mathematical board game. Its earliest known description dates from the eleventh century. The name comes loosely from Greek and means "The Battle of the Numbers."[a] The game is somewhat like chess except that most methods of capture depend on the numbers inscribed on each piece.
The game was used as an educational tool that teachers could introduce while teaching arithmetic as part of the quadrivium to those in Western Europe who received a classical education during the medieval period. *Wik
1602 Gilles de Roberval (August 9, 1602 – October 27, 1675)(His date of birth is given as 8th, 9th and 10th in various sources) was a French scientist who developed powerful methods in the early study of integration.*SAU Roberval was one of those mathematicians who, just before the invention of the infinitesimal calculus, occupied their attention with problems which are only soluble, or can be most easily solved, by some method involving limits or infinitesimals, which would today be solved by calculus. He worked on the quadrature of surfaces and the cubature of solids, which he accomplished, in some of the simpler cases, by an original method which he called the "Method of Indivisibles"; but he lost much of the credit of the discovery as he kept his method for his own use, while Bonaventura Cavalieri published a similar method which he independently invented.
Another of Roberval’s discoveries was a very general method of drawing tangents, by considering a curve as described by a moving point whose motion is the resultant of several simpler motions. (The limacon was named by Roberval in 1650 when he used it as an example of his methods of drawing tangents.)
He also discovered a method of deriving one curve from another, by means of which finite areas can be obtained equal to the areas between certain curves and their asymptotes. To these curves, which were also applied to effect some quadratures, Evangelista Torricelli gave the name "Robervallian lines."
(He also wrote a) work on the system of the universe, in which he supports the Copernican heliocentric system and attributes a mutual attraction to all particles of matter. *Wik
I was recently informed (2018) by Vincent Panteloni that in France, the balance scale, "We refer to such a scale by saying 'une balance de Roberval'".
1757 Thomas Telford (9 August 1757 Glendinning, Westerkirk, Eskdale, Dumfriesshire, Scotland - 2 September 1834 (aged 77) 24 Abingdon Street, Westminster, London) He is the founder of modern bridge construction, his crowning achievement being the Menai suspension bridge in Wales. Do you know the shape of the cables on a suspension bridge? *VFR
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Telford's reputation in Shropshire led to his appointment in 1793 to manage the detailed design and construction of the Ellesmere Canal, linking the ironworks and collieries of Wrexham via the north-west Shropshire town of Ellesmere, with Chester, utilising the existing Chester Canal, and then the River Mersey.
Among other structures, this involved the spectacular Pontcysyllte Aqueduct over the River Dee in the Vale of Llangollen, where Telford used a new method of construction consisting of troughs made from cast iron plates and fixed in masonry. Extending for over 1,000 feet (300 metres) with an altitude of 126 ft (38 m) above the valley floor, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct consists of nineteen arches, each with a 45 ft (14 m) span. Being a pioneer in the use of cast-iron for large scaled structures, Telford had to invent new techniques, such as using boiling sugar and lead as a sealant on the iron connections. Eminent canal engineer William Jessop oversaw the project, but he left the detailed execution of the project in Telford's hands. The aqueduct was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. *Wik
A canal boat traverses the Pontcysyllte aqueduct in North Wales
1776 Count Amedeo Avogadro (9 August 1776, Turin, Piedmont – 9 July 1856) Italian chemist and physicist who found that at the same temperature and pressure equal volumes of all perfect gases contain the same number of particles, known as Avogadro's Law (1811) leading to the Avogadro's constant being 6.022 x 1023 units per mole of a substance. He realized the particules could be either atoms, or more often, combinations of atoms, for which he coined the word "molecule." This explained Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes (1809). Further, Avogadro determined from the electrolysis of water that it contained molecules formed from two hydrogen atoms for each atom of oxygen, by which the individual oxygen atom was 16 times heavier than one hydrogen atom (not 8 times as suggested earlier by Dalton.) The Italian, Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro, had suggested [in 1811] that all gases have the same number of molecules in a given volume. Loschmidt figured out [in 1865] how many molecules that would be. John D. Cook suggested that maybe it should be called Loschmidt's constant, and pointed out three interesting coincidences involving Avogadro's Constant:
NA is approximately 24! (i.e., 24 factorial.)
The mass of the earth is approximately 10 NA kilograms.
The number of stars in the observable universe is 0.5 NA.
*John D. Cook, The Endeavour Blog
1819 Jonathan Homer Lane (August 9, 1819, Geneseo, New York – May 3, 1880, Washington D.C.) U.S. astrophysicist who was the first to investigate mathematically the Sun as a gaseous body. His work demonstrated the interrelationships of pressure, temperature, and density inside the Sun and was fundamental to the emergence of modern theories of stellar evolution.*TIS
1861 Dorothea Klumpke Roberts (August 9, 1861 in San Francisco – October 5, 1942 in San Francisco) was an American astronomer. She was the Director of the Bureau of Measurements at the Paris Observatory and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, or a Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honor.
In 1877, Klumpke moved to Paris, France, while her four sisters attended schools in Germany and Switzerland. She studied at the University of Paris. She began by studying music, but later turned to astronomy. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1886 and her PhD in 1893, with her dissertation focusing on the rings of Saturn.[7] In 1887, she began working at the Paris Observatory alongside Guillaume Bigourdan and Lipót Schulhof, and later astrophotographers Paul and Prosper Henry. Her work consisted of measuring star positions, processing astrophotographs, and studying stellar spectra and meteorites.
In 1886, Sir David Gill proposed an atlas of the heavens. The idea received enthusiastic support, especially from the Director of the Paris Observatory, Admiral Amédée Mouchez, who suggested an international meeting in Paris. This led to the Carte du Ciel project, which required photographing the entire sky and showing stars as faint as the 14th magnitude. The Paris Observatory was to do a major portion of the sky as its contribution. It was also envisioned that a catalogue of all the stars to the 11th magnitude be drawn up.
Klumpke was appointed the Director of the Bureau of Measurements (Bureau des Mesures) at the Paris Observatory, a position she held for a decade. She supervised several other women scientists during this time.
In 1896, she sailed to Norway on the Norwegian vessel Norse King, to observe the solar eclipse of August 9, 1896. There, she became acquainted with Dr. Isaac Roberts, a 67-year-old Welsh widower, entrepreneur, and astronomer, who had become a pioneer in astrophotography. He had also attended the Paris Carte du Ciel Congress.
In 1899, astronomers had predicted a great meteor shower now known as the Leonids. The French chose Klumpke to be the one to ride in a balloon to observe the shower. The shower turned out to be a complete failure.
In 1901, Dorothea Klumpke and Isaac Roberts were married and moved to his home in Sussex, England. Roberts left her job at the Paris Observatory to be with her husband, whom she assisted in a project to photograph all 52 of the Herschel "areas of nebulosity." Their marriage lasted until Isaac's death in 1904. Roberts inherited all his astronomical effects and a considerable fortune. *Wik
1911 William Alfred "Willie" Fowler (August 9, 1911 – March 14, 1995) American astrophysicist. He should not be confused with the British astronomer Alfred Fowler.
At age 23, she was the youngest and only female member of the team which built and experimented with the world's first nuclear reactor (then called a pile ), Chicago Pile-1, in a project led by her mentor Enrico Fermi. In particular, Woods was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation. She was the only woman present when the reactor went critical. She worked with Fermi on the Manhattan Project, and, together with her first husband John Marshall, she subsequently helped solve the problem of xenon poisoning at the Hanford plutonium production site, and supervised the construction and operation of Hanford's plutonium production reactors.
After the war, she became a fellow at Fermi's Institute for Nuclear Studies. She later worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and New York University, where she became a professor in 1962. Her research involved high-energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology. In 1966 she divorced Marshall and married Nobel laureate Willard Libby. She became a professor at the University of Colorado, and a staff member at RAND Corporation. In later life she became interested in ecological and environmental issues, and she devised a method of using the isotope ratios in tree rings to study climate change. She was a strong advocate of food irradiation as a means of killing harmful bacteria. *Wik
1927 Marvin Minsky (August 9, 1927 - January 24, 2016 (aged 88)) Biochemist and the founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project. Marvin Minsky has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. He holds several patents, including those for the first neural-network simulator (SNARC, 1951), the first head-mounted graphical display, the first confocal scanning microscope, and the LOGO "turtle" device. His other inventions include mechanical hands and the "Muse" synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin). In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. *TIS He died in Boston of a cerebral hemorrhage .
1940 Linda Goldway Keen (8 August 1940- ) In addition to studying Riemann surfaces, Keen has worked in hyperbolic geometry, Kleinian groups and Fuchsian groups, complex analysis, and hyperbolic dynamics. In the field of hyperbolic geometry, she is known for the Collar lemma.
Keen has worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Hunter College, University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Boston University, Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as at various mathematical institutes in Europe and South America. After her initial appointment in 1965, in 1974 Keen was promoted to Full Professor at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Keen served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics during 1985-1986 and as vice-president of the American Mathematical Society during 1992-1995. She served on the Board of Trustees of the American Mathematical Society from 1999-2009 and as Associate Treasurer from 2009-2011. In 1975, she presented an AMS invited address and in 1989 she presented an MAA joint invited address. In 1993 she was selected as a Noether Lecturer. *Wik
1943 Jacques Lewiner, (9 August, 1943 - ) is a French physicist and inventor. He is Professor and Honorary Scientific Director of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI ParisTech).
His works have been devoted to electrical insulators and particularly electrets, instrumentation and sensors, for instance in medical imaging, or on the improvement of telecommunication networks.
He has filed a large number of patent applications leading to industrial development, either through licenses granted to industrial companies or through start-up companies often created with former students or researchers. He has participated in the creation of various technology oriented start up companies, for instance Inventel, specializing in Telecommunications, Finsécur which develops and markets fire detection systems, Sculpteo which is an online 3D printing platform, Roowin in the field of chemical synthesis and Cynove in embedded electronics devices. Most of these companies have experienced a strong growth. For instance Inventel, which was the French leader for multimedia gateways was bought by Thomson SA in 2005.
Lewiner is laureate of the French Academy of Sciences in 1990, Knight in the National Order of the Legion of Honor, member of the French Academy of Technologies since 2005 and Honorary Fellow of the Technion. *Wik
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1853 Josef-Maria Hoëné de Wronski (23 August 1776 - 9 August 1853)wrote on the philosophy of mathematics. *SAU He wrote exclusively in French, desirous that his ideas, of whose immortality he was convinced, should be accessible to all; he worked, he said, "through France for Poland." He published over a hundred works, and left many more in manuscript. When dying in the seventy-fifth year of his life, he exclaimed: "God Almighty, there's still so much more I wanted to say!"
In science, Hoene-Wroński set himself maximal tasks: the complete reform of philosophy and of mathematics, astronomy, technology. He not only elaborated a system of philosophy, but applications to politics, history, economics, law, psychology, music, pedagogy. It was his aspiration to reform human knowledge in an "absolute, that is, ultimate" manner.
Though during his lifetime nearly all his work was dismissed as nonsense, some of it has come in later years to be seen in a more favorable light. Although nearly all his grandiose claims were in fact unfounded, his mathematical work contains flashes of deep insight and many important intermediary results. Most significant was his work on series. He had strongly criticized Lagrange's use of infinite series, introducing instead a novel series expansion for a function. His criticisms of Lagrange were for the most part unfounded, but the coefficients in Wroński's new series were found to be important after his death, forming the determinants now known as the Wronskians (the name was given them by Thomas Muir in 1882).
The level of Wroński's scientific and scholarly accomplishments, and the amplitude of his objectives, placed Wroński in the first rank of European metaphysicians in the early 19th century. But the abstractness, formalism and obscurity of his thought, the difficulty of his language, his boundless self-assurance, his uncompromising judgments of others—alienated. He was perhaps the most original of the Polish metaphysicians, but others were more representative of the Polish outlook. *Wik
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1969 Cecil Frank Powell (5 December 1903 – 9 August 1969) British physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1950 for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of the pion (pi-meson), a heavy subatomic particle. The pion proved to be the hypothetical particle proposed in 1935 by Yukawa Hideki of Japan in his theory.*TIS
1994 Helena Rasiowa (June 20, 1917 – August 9, 1994) worked in algebraic logic and the mathematical foundations of computer science.*SAU
2006 James Alfred Van Allen (September 7, 1914 – August 9, 2006) American physicist who discovered the Earth's magnetosphere, two toroidal zones of radiation due to trapped charged particles encircling the Earth (also known as the Van Allen radiation belts). During WWII he gained experience miniaturizing electronics, such as in the proximity fuse of a missile. After the war, he studied cosmic radiation, taking advantage of the unused German stock of V2 rockets launched into the outer regions of the atmosphere, carrying research devices using radio to relay back the data gathered. He was also involved in the early U.S. space program, and he had radiation measuring instruments on the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, launched 31 Jan 1958 with follow-up carried out by satellites Explorer 3 and 4 later the same year.*TIS
2007 Graham Robert Allan (August 13, 1936 Southgate, London - August 9, 2007 (aged 70)) was an English mathematician, specializing in Banach algebras. He was a reader in functional analysis and vice-master of Churchill College at Cambridge University.
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
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