To throw in a fair game at Hazards only three-spots, when something great is at stake, or some business is the hazard, is a natural occurrence and deserves to be so deemed; and even when they come up the same way for a second time if the throw be repeated. If the third and fourth plays are the same, surely there is occasion for suspicion on the part of a prudent man.
~Girolamo Cardano
The 264th Day of the Year
264 = 23x3x11 is a harshad number (a number divisible by the sum of its digits). The word "Harshad" comes from the Sanskrit harṣa (joy) + da (give), meaning joy-giver. The numbers were defined and named by the famous Indian Mathematician D. R. Kaprekar.
Jim Wilder @wilderlab pointed out that the sum of all 2-digit numbers you can make from 264 totals 264... 24 + 42 + 26 + 62 + 46 + 64.
2642 = 69696, a palindrome; and 264 is the sum of ten consecutive primes. *Chaw points out that this is the only square less than 2,000,000,000 that is both a palindrome and a sum of twin primes, 34847 and 34849.
264 is a repdigit in base 11 (222).
264 = 66^2 - 64^2 = 35^2- 31^2,
264 is one more than a prime.
264 is the Area of two integer sided triangles, with sides 33, 34, 65 and 44, 37, 15.
264 = 2^8 + 2^3,
1781 Writing to his friend and mentor d’Alembert, Lagrange expressed concern that mathematics was reaching its creative end. “It seems,” he wrote, “that the mine is almost too deep already, and unless new seams are discovered, it will be necessary to abandon it sooner or later. Physics and chemistry now offer riches that are more brilliant and easier to exploit.” *Amir R. Alexander , Tragic Mathematics, Isis, Vol. 97, No. 4, December 2006
Strangely, around 1900 Physicists were bemoaning that "there was nothing new to discover", and then the cornucopia exploded.
1784 The nation's first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, began publication on September 21, 1784. Many independent newspapers ran before that on a weekly or monthly basis. America's first independent newspaper, the New England Courant, was published by Benjamin Franklin's older brother in 1721. By the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, there were 37 independent newspapers to keep the colonists informed. *Libray of Congress
The paper was founded by John Dunlap as a weekly paper in late 1771. It was based in Philadelphia, except during the British occupation of the city between 1777 and 1778, when Dunlap published the paper in Lancaster. David C. Claypoole eventually became a partner with Dunlap. As of September 21, 1784, the paper was issued as the Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser, reflecting the paper's move to daily publication.
This newspaper subsequently underwent additional name changes, dropping the Pennsylvania Packet prefix in 1791 and becoming Dunlap's American Daily Advertiser (1791–1793), Dunlap and Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser (1793–1795), and Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser (1796-1800).
On September 21, 1796, it became the first to publish George Washington's Farewell Address.
In 1800, Zachariah Poulson purchased the paper and renamed it Poulson's American Daily Advertiser.
In 1825, the Marquis De Lafayette granted an interview to "Poulson's Advertiser" during his famous visit to the United States.
Poulson ran the paper for almost forty years; at the end of 1839, he sold the publication to the owners of the recently founded North American. The North American featured the 1771 founding of the Packet as its heritage.
To the extent it can honestly be traced past this point, the final successor of the Packet can be said to be The Philadelphia Inquirer.*Wik
1832 Mary Somerville's gender prevented her from attending university, or full membership in scientific societies. On 21 September 1832, The Naval and Military Library and Museum of London became the first society to list Somerville as an honorary member . Honorary memberships in several other scientific societies would follow, including Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) (With Caroline Herschel), in February 1835. *Mathematical Intelligencer
When she died in 1872, The Morning Post declared in her obituary that "Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science".
Page 157 from Mechanism of the Heavens, Somerville discusses the law of universal gravity and Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
1908 On this day in 1908 Hermann Minkowski began his famous lecture at the University of Cologne with these words:-
The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
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1925 Edith Clarke patent for the Clark Calculator is approved. The calculator was a simple graphical device that solved equations involving electric current, voltage and impedance in power transmission lines. The device could solve line equations involving hyperbolic functions ten times faster than previous methods. She filed a patent for the calculator in 1921 and it was granted in 1925. Ms. Clarke is generally thought of as the first female electrical engineer in the U. S.
In 1947, she joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin, making her the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country. She taught for 10 years and retired in 1957.
1983 This set of four stamps honors some of America's top inventors. Charles Steinmetz devised methods of harnessing high voltage for the Niagara Falls Power Plant, Edwin Armstrong invented FM radio, Nikola Tesla developed the generator and other devices that made alternating current (AC) possible, and Philo T. Farnsworth invented the first television camera.
1984 Science reported (pp. 1379-1380) that Narendra Karmarkar of AT & T Bell Labs found a practical polynomial-time algorithm that is far faster than the simplex algorithm for linear programming problems. [Mathematics Magazine 58 (1985), p. 53]. *VFR
Karmarkar's algorithm falls within the class of interior-point methods: the current guess for the solution does not follow the boundary of the feasible set as in the simplex method, but moves through the interior of the feasible region, improving the approximation of the optimal solution by a definite fraction with every iteration and converging to an optimal solution with rational data.
2012 Clear skies allowed a clear view of the fire balls which were witnessed right across the UK, Ireland and even parts of north west Europe.Bright 'meteor-like' tails could be seen in the sky for approximately two minutes at 10.55pm on Friday night.
The fireball was also seen in the US, "Portsmouth, RI, USA 2245 EST 4 to 5 seconds South to North Initially white, turned orange, then turned greenish-blue as it got low on horizon Like a flare but definately not a flare. Yes, from the "ball" itself. The tail was approximately 5 times longer than the ball itself. The tail remained a bright white even though the ball changed color. Was definitely not the typical "shooting star"."
According to the modeling done by Finnish mathematician Esko Lyytinen, the big UK fireball of the 21st of September was captured by Earth`s gravity.
After one circle around the Earth one of the remnants seems to have re-entered the skies over North America.
"It looks now that the fireball witnessed 155 minutes later in US and Canada, may have been one fragment of the British fireball, most probably the biggest one. This was its second entry into the Earth`s atmosphere", Lyytinen says. "If so, this is historical scientific observation, but it needs to be confirmed." * LunarMeteorite*Hunter and other sources
1623 Stefano degli Angeli (21 Sept 1623 , 11 Oct 1697) His many mathematical works were on infinitesimals and he used them to study spirals, parabolas and hyperbolas. While in Venice he published De infinitorum parabolis (1654), De infinitorum spiralium spatiorum mensura (1660) which contains a generalisation of Archimedes' spiral, and De infinitorum cochlearum mensuris ac centris gravitatis (1661) which carries out Torricelli's intention of finding the centre of gravity of a solid body called a cochlea. The approach followed by Angeli in all these works is that of his teacher Cavalieri and of Torricelli, so when Guldin and Tacquet attacked these methods and defended the approach of the ancient Greeks, Angeli disputed with them over indivisibles. One has to see both sides in this argument for although Angeli's methods were much more powerful, they were less rigorous than the method of exhaustion adopted by Archimedes. Angeli examined fluid statics based on Archimedes' principle and Torricelli's experiments. He published Della gravita dell aria e fluidi in 1671 while holding the chair at Padua. He also considered the motion bodies falling towards a rotating Earth. Of course Angeli held the chair at Padua which had been held earlier by Galileo and his work shows strong influences from his predecessor. For example Angeli often refers to Galileo in his writings on physics, showing clearly how he has been influenced, particularly in terms of ways of approaching problems via the experimental method. Also clearly influenced by Galileo is Angeli's writings on the two systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus which he writes in Galileo's dialogue style.*SAU
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1845 Elizaveta Fedorovna Litvinova (21 Sept, 1845–1919?) was a Russian mathematician and pedagogue. She is the author of over 70 articles about mathematics education.
Born in 1845 in czarist Russia as Elizaveta Fedorovna Ivashkina, she completed her early education at a women's high school in Saint Petersburg. In 1866 Elizaveta married Viktor Litvinov, who, unlike Vladimir Kovalevsky (Sofia Kovalevskaya's husband), would not allow her to travel to Europe to study at the universities there. Thus, Litvinova started to study with Strannoliubskii, who had also privately tutored Kovalevskaya.
In 1872, as soon as her husband died, Litvinova went to Zürich and enrolled at a polytechnic institute. In 1873 the Russian czar decreed all Russian women studying in Zürich had to return to Russia or face the consequences. Litvinova was one of the few to ignore the decree and she remained to continue her studies, earning her baccalaureate in Zürich in 1876. She completed her doctoral degree in 1878 from the University of Bern, as a student of Ludwig Schläfli, becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics in Switzerland.
When Litvinova returned to Russia, she was denied university appointments because she had defied the 1873 recall. She taught at a women's high school and supplemented her meager income by writing biographies of more famous mathematicians such as Kovalevskaya and Aristotle. After retiring, Litvinova moved to the countryside in 1917. Although no subsequent records have been found, it is believed that she must have died soon after, possibly in the Russian famine of 1921–1922 or earlier.
1853 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (21 Sep 1853; 21 Feb 1926) Dutch winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1913 for his work on low-temperature physics and his production of liquid helium. He discovered superconductivity, the almost total lack of electrical resistance in certain materials when cooled to a temperature near absolute zero.*TIS
1884 Denes König (21 Sept 1884, 19 Oct 1944) His book, Theorie der endlichen und unendlichen Graphen, was published in 1936, and was a major factor in the growth of interest in graph theory worldwide. It was eventually translated into English under the title Theory of finite and infinite graphs (translated by R McCoart), Birkhauser, 1990; this also contains a biographical sketch by Tibor Gallai.
König's work on the factorisation of bipartite graphs relates closely to the marriage problem of Philip Hall. König's use of graphs to give a simpler proof of a determinant result of Frobenius seems to have led to some hostility between the two men.
After the Nazi occupation of Hungary, König worked to help persecuted mathematicians. This led to his death a few days after the Hungarian National Socialist Party took over the country. *SAU
1895 Joseph Leonard Walsh (21 Sept 1895, 6 Dec 1973) Walsh had a remarkable publication record. An obituary by Morris Marden (a student of Walsh) lists 279 articles, 7 books and 31 PhD students. He studied the relative location of the zeros of pairs of rational functions, zeros and topology of extremal polynomials, the critical points and level lines of Green's functions and other harmonic functions, conformal mappings, Padé approximation, and the interpolation and approximation of continuous, analytic or harmonic functions. Sewell writes "Polynomial approximation was neither discovered nor invented by J L Walsh (which may come as a surprise to some mathematicians). He is the one individual, however, who took a few scattered results on the subject and extended them, added mightily to them, and knit the whole together into a comprehensive, coherent theory." *SAU
1899 Juliusz Paweł Schauder (September 21, 1899, Lwów, Austria-Hungary – September 1943, Lwów, Occupied Poland) was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential equations and mathematical physics.
He had to fight in World War I right after his graduation from school. He was captured and imprisoned in Italy. He entered the university in Lwów in 1919 and received his doctorate in 1923. He got no appointment at the university and continued his research while working as teacher at a secondary school. Due to his outstanding results, he obtained a scholarship in 1932 that allowed him to spend several years in Leipzig and, especially, Paris. In Paris he started a very successful collaboration with Jean Leray. Around 1935 Schauder obtained the position of a senior assistant in the University of Lwów.
Schauder was Jewish, and after the invasion of German troops in Lwów it was impossible for him to continue his work. In his letters to Swiss mathematicians, he wrote that he had important new results, but no paper to write them down. He was executed by the Gestapo, probably in October 1943.
Most of his mathematical work belongs to the field of functional analysis, being part of a large Polish group of mathematicians, i.e. Lwów School of Mathematics. They were pioneers in this area with wide applications in all parts of modern analysis. Schauder is best known for the Schauder fixed point theorem which is a major tool to prove the existence of solutions in various problems, the Schauder bases (a generalization of an orthonormal basis from Hilbert spaces to Banach spaces), and the Leray−Schauder principle, a way to establish solutions of partial differential equations from a priori estimates. *Wik
1907 Sir Edward Crisp Bullard (21 Sep 1907; 3 Apr 1980) English marine geophysicist noted for his work in geomagnetism who made the first satisfactory measurements of geothermal heat-flow through the oceanic crust. In early work, he measured minute gravitational variations by timing the swings of an invariant pendulum, which he used to study the East African Rift Valley. Bullard helped to develop the theory of continental drift. He made a computer analysis of the precise fit of the rifted continental borders along the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and presented his results to the Royal Society of London. He developed a "dynamo" theory of geomagnetism, which explained the Earth's magnetic field results from the convection of molten material within the Earth's core. He was knighted in 1953.*TIS
1917 Phyllis Nicolson (21 September 1917 – 6 October 1968) was a British mathematician and physicist best known for her work on the Crank–Nicolson method together with John Crank.
Nicolson was born Phyllis Lockett in Macclesfield and went to Stockport High School for Girls. She graduated from Manchester University with a B.Sc. in 1938, M.Sc. in 1939 and a Ph.D. on Three Problems in Theoretical Physics in 1946. Her Ph.D. thesis began with cosmic ray research conducted under Lajos Jánossy during 1939 and 1940.
Nicolson's Ph.D. was expected to be submitted in 1941 but was interrupted by wartime work with Douglas Hartree's research group at Manchester University from 1940 to 1945. During this time, Nicolson became a proficient numerical analyst and an expert user of Hartree's differential analyser. Nicolson, along with other members of the research group worked on defence-related problems for the Air Defence Research and Development Establishment (later the Radar Research and Development Establishment), both part of the Ministry of Supply. Nicolson's two significant bodies of wartime research, "Transient behaviour in the single anode magnetron" and "heat conduction", formed the basis of parts II and III of her 1946 PhD thesis Three Problems in Theoretical Physics.
Nicolson's research on heat conduction related to solutions of the heat equation, and with her colleague John Crank she investigated the numerical stability of several solution techniques. The algorithm now known as the Crank–Nicolson method emerged from this work and was published in 1947.
Nicolson was a research student in Cambridge from 1945 and completed her Ph.D. thesis completed at the Victoria University of Manchester (now Manchester University) in 1946. She was a Tucker-Price Research Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge from 1946 to 1949, working at the Cavendish Laboratory. Nicolson moved to Leeds around January 1950 with her husband Malcolm Nicolson, also a physicist, as he had been appointed to a lectureship in Physics at Leeds University. Phyllis Nicolson had married Malcolm in 1942 and they had two sons, Donald Macleod Nicolson (born 20 September 1947 in Cambridge) and Roderick Ian Nicolson (born 5 February 1950 in Leeds).
Malcolm Nicolson, aged 33, died in a train accident in December 1951, and Phyllis was appointed to take over his lectureship. In 1955, Nicolson married physicist Malcolm McCaig, who had a son Ian McCaig (born February 1946) from a previous marriage. In May 1957, Nicolson and McCaig had a son together, Andrew Malcolm McCaig. All three of Nicolson's sons ended up getting PhDs – in mathematics, psychology, and geology
1926 Donald A. Glaser (21 Sep 1926, 28 Feb 2013)American physicist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1960 for his invention of the bubble chamber in which the behavior of subatomic particles can be observed by the tracks they leave. A flash photograph records the particle's path. Glaser's chamber contains a superheated liquid maintained in a superheated, unstable state without boiling. A piston causing a rapid decrease in pressure creates a tendency to boil at the slightest disturbance in the liquid. Then any atomic particle passing through the chamber leaves a track of small gas bubbles caused by an instantaneous boiling along its path where the ions it creates act as bubble-development centers.*TIS With the freedom that accompanies a Nobel Prize, he soon began to explore the new field of molecular biology, and in 1971 joined two friends, Ronald E. Cape and Peter Farley, to found the first biotechnology company, Cetus Corp., to exploit new discoveries for the benefit of medicine and agriculture. The company developed interleukin and interferon as cancer therapies, but was best known for producing a powerful genetic tool, the polymerase chain reaction, to amplify DNA. In 1991, Cetus was sold to Chiron Corp., now part of Novartis. Glaser died in his sleep Thursday morning, Feb. 28, at his home in Berkeley. He was 86. *Philosophy of Science Portal
One story says that it was by his own hand so as to fulfill his earlier astrological prediction of of his death on this date. *H. Eves, Introduction to the History of Mathematics, Pg 221...
He was the first to give a clinical description of typhus fever. His book, Ars magna ("Great Art," 1545) was one of the great achievements in the history of algebra, in which he published the solutions to the cubic and quartic equations.(Ars Magna was the first Latin treatise devoted solely to algebra. In it he gave the methods of solution of the cubic and quartic equations which he had learned from Tartaglia.*SAU) His mechanical inventions included the combination lock, the compass gimbal consisting of three concentric rings, and the universal joint to transmit rotary motion at various angles (as used in present-day vehicles). He contributed to hydrodynamics and held that perpetual motion is impossible, except in celestial bodies. He published two encyclopedias of natural science and introduced the Cardan grille, a cryptographic tool (1550).*TIS
1842 Sir James Ivory (17 February 1765 – 21 September 1842) was a Scottish mathematician born in Dundee. He was essentially a self-trained mathematician, and was not only deeply versed in ancient and modern geometry, but also had a full knowledge of the analytical methods and discoveries of the continental mathematicians.
His earliest memoir, dealing with an analytical expression for the rectification of the ellipse, is published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1796); and this and his later papers on Cubic Equations (1799) and Kepler's Problem (1802) evince great facility in the handling of algebraic formulae. In 1804 after the dissolution of the flax-spinning company of which he was manager, he obtained one of the mathematical chairs in the Royal Military College at Marlow (afterwards removed to Sandhurst); and until the year 1816, when failing health obliged him to resign, he discharged his professional duties with remarkable success.*Wik
1859 Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (28 January 1794 – 21 September 1859), better known as Auguste Comte (French: [oɡyst kɔ̃t]), was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.
Strongly influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism, though now outdated, set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.
Comte's social theories culminated in the "Religion of Humanity", which influenced the development of religious humanist and secular humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word altruisme (altruism)*Wik
1937 Jessie Chrystal MacMillan (13 June 1872 in Edinburgh, Scotland - 21 September 1937 in Edinburgh, Scotland) was the first female science graduate at Edinburgh University and the first female honors graduate in Mathematics. She went on to study at Berlin. She was the first woman to plead a case before the House of Lords. She became active in the Women's Suffrage Movement and went on to become a lawyer.
A Millennial plaque is at Kings Buildings (West Mains Road), in Edinburgh. It reads:
In honour of
JESSIE CHRYSTAL MACMILLAN
1872-1937
Suffragist, founder of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom,
first woman science graduate of the University (1896).
*SAU
1950 Edward Arthur Milne (14 Feb 1896, 21 Sep 1950) English astrophysicist and cosmologist best known for his development of kinematic relativity. Poor eyesight prevented him from active service in WWI, he did important war service in research in ballistics and sound ranging, and problems related to the atmosphere of the earth.. From 1920-29, he studied problems of radiative equilibrium and the theory of stellar atmospheres. He extended work done earlier by Schuster and by Schwarzschild, which he combined in a mathematical interesting integral equation now known as Milne's integral equation. Later, he turned to the theory of stellar structure and cosmology. After 1932, he concentrated on a new form of relativity called kinematic relativity, an alternative to Einstein's general theory.*TIS (In Eurekas and Euphorias Walter Gratzer tells an interesting story about Milne's rejected offer to provide his services to the war effort in WWII. Milne had given important service (above) in WWI and wrote to offer his services for this war as well, but received a rather dismissive letter to which he took offense. He used his extensive connections to have his anger made known to the higher-ups at the War Office. Eventually he received a request from a Brigadier General to come to his office. Milne arrived and amidst his tirade advised the General that the War Office should know that this war would be a scientific one, and the way he was treated was not the way to make the best use of eminent scientists. The General waited out Milne's outburst, and then asked a single question, "Did you win the Adams Prize in your year?" When Milne said he had not, but asked what that had to do with anything, the General replied, "I did!"
I'm not sure what, if any, were Milne's contributions to the war effort in WWII.)
I'm not sure what, if any, were Milne's contributions to the war effort in WWII.)
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1981 Henry George Forder (27 Sept 1889, 21 Sept 1981) Forder spent much of his career in the Chair of Mathematics at Auckland. In fact he only once left New Zealand after settling there, this being in 1947 when he spent part of his leave in England. He spent 21 years building up the Mathematics Department at Auckland from a Department of a professor with one assistant when he arrived to one of six staff by the time he retired in 1955.
It is the books that Forder wrote which have given him a high reputation in the mathematical world. These are: The Foundations of Euclidean Geometry (1927), A School Geometry (1930), Higher Course Geometry (1931), The Calculus of Extension (1941), Geometry (1950), and Coordinates in Geometry (1953). In the Preface to the first of these, Forder writes, "Although the Euclidean geometry is the oldest of the sciences and has been studied critically for over two thousand years, it seems there is no textbook which gives a connected and rigorous account of that doctrine in the light of modern investigations. It is hoped that this book will fill the gap."
Geometry (1950) was reviewed by Donald Coxeter who was clearly fascinated by Forder's use of language, "The two-cusped epicycloid is described as the bright curve seen "when the sun shines on a cup of tea." ... The chapter on logical structure stresses the abstract nature of the order relation (ABC) by comparing it with the human relation "A prefers C to B." The possibility of coordinatising any descriptive geometry of three or more dimensions is epitomized in the statement that "we can create magnitudes from a mere muchness," and Archimedes' axiom in the statement that "you will always reach home, if you walk long enough." *SAU
Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell
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