"Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs ...
may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimensions,
and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality."
~ Edwin Abbott Abbott, FlatlandThe 285th day of the year, 285 is a square pyramidal number (like a stack of cannonballs, or oranges with the base in a square)... Or.. the sum of the first nine squares.
285 is 555 in base 7.
Not sure how rare this is, but just saw it on MAA's Number a Day and was intrigued, 285^2 = 81225 uses the same digits as 135^2 (18225) and 159^2 (25281).
A number 
is said to be anti-perfect if it is equal to the sum of the reverses of its proper divisors.
EVENTS
1793 At the University of North Carolina, the cornerstone was laid for “Old East,” the oldest state university building in the U.S.*VFR
is said to be anti-perfect if it is equal to the sum of the reverses of its proper divisors.For example, 244 is anti-perfect since its proper divisors are 1, 2, 4, 61, 122 and the sum of their reversal is 1 + 2 + 4 + 16 + 221 = 244.
The known anti-perfect numbers are 6, 244, 285, 133857, 141635817 *Numbers aplenty
1793 At the University of North Carolina, the cornerstone was laid for “Old East,” the oldest state university building in the U.S.*VFR
Over an interior doorway in the Chapel Hill Courthouse and Post Office building, a mural by Dean Cornwell depicts the laying of the cornerstone of Old East by William Richardson Davie, "Grand Master of Free Masons of North Carolina, Trustee and Commissioner," assisted by other commissioners and "the Brethren of the Eagle and Independence Lodges." Cornwell, "The Dean of Illustrators" and President of the Society of Illustrators from 1922 to 1926, was an accomplished commercial illustrator, famous for his full-color print ads for Seagrams, Palmolive, General Motors, and Coca-Cola, as well as art for Cosmopolitan and other prominent magazines in the 1920s. He was also renowned for his patriotic war posters in the 1940s.
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| *The Carolina Story |
1799 Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin (née Labrosse; 7 March 1775 – 14 June 1847) was a French balloonist and parachutist. She was the first to ascend solo and the first woman to make a parachute descent (in the gondola), from an altitude of 900 metres (3,000 ft) on 12 October 1799.
Labrosse first flew on 10 November 1798, one of the earliest women to fly in a balloon. She was the wife of André-Jacques Garnerin, a hydrogen balloonist and inventor of the frameless parachute.
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1810 the German festival Oktoberfest was first held in Munich. Reaallly good ideas WILL spread.
1850, classes began at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, the first medical school entirely for women.*TIS
Originally called the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, the college changed its name in 1867 to Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. The associated Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1861. Upon deciding to admit men in 1970, the college was renamed as the Medical College of Pennsylvania. *Wik
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| *Natl Lib of Medicine |
1884 George Bruce Halsted presented his inaugural address before the Texas Academy of Science. He spoke of his teacher at Johns Hopkins, J. J. Sylvester, and related how the rumor started that Sylvester killed a student when he was at the university of Virginia. [Science, 22 February 1885; vol. 1, no. 8, p. 265] *VFR
1988 Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT, the computer he designed after moving on from Apple Computer Inc., which he had founded with Steve Wozniak. Although the NeXT ultimately failed, it introduced several features new to personal computers, including an optical storage disk, a built-in digital signal processor that allowed voice recognition, and object-oriented languages that simplified programming. On a microprocessor with 8 megabytes of RAM, however, the NeXT ran too slowly to be popular. NeXT Computer Inc. eventually became NeXT Software Inc. and then was bought by Apple in 1997. *CHM
1996: A solar eclipse was broadcast live on the internet for the first time. * BBC Archive @BBCArchive
802,701 Oct. 12 was the date on the dial when the time-sled in the film The Time Machine (1960) slid to a stop in the land of the Eloi. The year, however, was 802,701 . The film was produced by George Pal, who had introduced the Golden Age of Sci-Fi into cinema by giving us Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953); he then brought it to a close with The Time Machine, his finest effort, in my opinion. The film starred Rod Taylor as H. George Wells, builder of the time machine and bearing the name of the author of the original novel, H.G. Wells, who published the book The Time Machine in 1895. *Linda Hall Org
2024 The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered a new Mersenne prime number, 2^136279841-1. At 41,024,320 digits, it eclipses by more than 16 million digits the previous largest known prime number found by GIMPS nearly 6 years ago.
Here is the GINPS news release from Oct 21, 2024:
BLOWING ROCK, NC, October 21, 2024 -- The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2136,279,841-1, having 41,024,320 decimal digits. Luke Durant, from San Jose, California, found the prime on October 12th.
Luke is currently GIMPS' most prolific contributor. He is joined by thousands of volunteers using free GIMPS software available at www.mersenne.org/download/.
The new prime number, also known as M136279841, is calculated by multiplying together 136,279,841 twos, and then subtracting 1. It is over 16 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 52nd known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly more difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 18 Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes, with a $3000 award offered to anyone lucky enough to find a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell founded an authoritative web site on the largest known primes which is now maintained by volunteers, and has an excellent history of Mersenne primes
1860 Elmer Sperry (12 Oct 1860; 16 Jun 1930) American electrical engineer and inventor of the gyrocompass. In the 1890's he made useful inventions in electric mining machinery, and patent electric brake and control system for street- or tramcars. In 1908, he patented the active gyrostabilizer which acted to stop a ship's roll as soon as it started. He patented the first gyrocompass designed expressly for the marine environment in 1910. This "spinning wheel" gyro was a significant improvement over the traditional magnetic compass of the day and changed the course of naval history. The first Sperry gyrocompass was tested at-sea aboard the USS Delaware in 1911 and established Sperry as a world leader in the manufacture of military gyrocompasses for the next 80 years. *TIS
Fogels retired in 1966 but continued his scientific work with research on the Hecke's L-functions, prime ideals and the Riemann hypothesis until his death on 22 February 1985 in Latvia.
1913 Subbaramiah Minakshisundaram (12 October 1913 - 13 August 1968), also known as Minakshi or SMS, was an Indian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and heat kernels. In 1946, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, America, where he met Åke Pleijel. In 1949, the two wrote a paper together called, Some properties of the eigenfunctions of the Laplace-operator on Riemannian manifolds, in which they introduced the Minakshisundaram-Pleijel zeta function.
On the 13th of August 1968, Subbaramiah suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 55.
1954 Verdiana Grace Masanja (née Kashaga, born October 12, 1954 - ] is a Tanzanian mathematician specializing in fluid dynamics. She is the first Tanzanian woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics.
She earned a second master's degree in physics and completed her doctorate in fluid dynamics at [Technische Universität Berlin]]. Her dissertation, A Numerical Study of a Reiner–Rivlin Fluid in an Axi-Symmetrical Circular Pipe, was jointly supervised by Wolfgang Muschik and Gerd Brunk.
Already, while a master's student, Masanja had become a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, and on her return from Germany she became a professor there, and remained on the university's faculty until 2010. In 2006 she began teaching as well at the National University of Rwanda, and in 2007 became a professor there, as well as being appointed as the university's director of research, and as deputy vice chancellor and senior advisor at the University of Kibungo in Rwanda. In 2018 she returned to Tanzania as a professor of applied and computational mathematics at the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology in Arusha.
Masanja has served as vice president for Eastern Africa of the African Mathematical Union, chaired the African Mathematical Union Commission on Women in Mathematics in Africa[4] and the Tanzania Education Network, and has served as National Coordinator for Female Education in Mathematics in Africa.
1492 Piero della Francesca (June 1420, 12 Oct 1492) was an Italian artist who pioneered the use of perspective in Renaissance art and went on to write several mathematical treatises. In his own time he was also known as a highly competent mathematician. In his Lives of the most famous painters ... , Giorgio Vasari (1511-1572) says that Piero showed mathematical ability in his earliest youth and went on to write 'many' mathematical treatises. Of these, three are now known to survive. The titles by which they are known are: Abacus treatise (Trattato d'abaco), Short book on the five regular solids (Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus) and On perspective for painting (De prospectiva pingendi). Piero almost certainly wrote all three works in the vernacular (his native dialect was Tuscan), and all three are in the style associated with the tradition of 'practical mathematics', that is, they consist largely of series of worked examples, with rather little discursive text.
The Abacus treatise is similar to works used for instructional purposes in 'Abacus schools'. It deals with arithmetic, starting with the use of fractions, and works through series of standard problems, then it turns to algebra, and works through similarly standard problems, then it turns to geometry and works through rather more problems than is standard before (without warning) coming up with some entirely original three-dimensional problems involving two of the 'Archimedean polyhedra' (those now known as the truncated tetrahedron and the cuboctahedron).
Four more Archimedeans appear in the Short book on the five regular solids: the truncated cube, the truncated octahedron, the truncated icosahedron and the truncated dodecahedron. (All these modern names are due to Johannes Kepler (1619).) Piero appears to have been the independent re-discoverer of these six solids. Moreover, the way he describes their properties makes it clear that he has in fact invented the notion of truncation in its modern mathematical sense.
On perspective for painting is the first treatise to deal with the mathematics of perspective, a technique for giving an appearance of the third dimension in two-dimensional works such as paintings or sculptured reliefs. Piero is determined to show that this technique is firmly based on the science of vision (as it was understood in his time). He accordingly starts with a series of mathematical theorems, some taken from the optical work of Euclid (possibly through medieval sources) but some original to Piero himself. Some of these theorems are of independent mathematical interest, but on the whole the work is conceived as a manual for teaching painters to draw in perspective, and the detailed drawing instructions are mind-numbing in their repetitiousness. There are many diagrams and illustrations, but unfortunately none of the known manuscripts has illustrations actually drawn by Piero himself.
None of Piero's mathematical work was published under his own name in the Renaissance, but it seems to have circulated quite widely in manuscript and became influential through its incorporation into the works of others. Much of Piero's algebra appears in Pacioli's Summa (1494), much of his work on the Archimedeans appears in Pacioli's De divina proportione (1509), and the simpler parts of Piero's perspective treatise were incorporated into almost all subsequent treatises on perspective addressed to painters. *SAU
First page of the Trattato d'Abaco
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1912 Lewis Boss (26 Oct 1846, 12 Oct 1912) American astronomer best known for his compilation of two catalogues of stars (1910, 1937). In 1882 he led an expedition to Chile to observe a transit of Venus. About 1895 Boss began to plan a general catalog of stars, giving their positions and motions. After 1906, the project had support from the Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C. With an enlarged staff he observed the northern stars from Albany and the southern stars from Argentina. With the new data, he corrected catalogs that had been compiled in the past, and in 1910 he published the Preliminary General Catalogue of 6,188 Stars for the Epoch 1900. The work unfinished upon his death was completed by his son Benjamin in 1937*TIS
1926 Edwin Abbott Abbott (20 Dec 1838, 12 Oct 1926) His most famous work was Flatland: a romance of many dimensions (1884) which Abbott wrote under the pseudonym of A Square. The book has seen many editions, the sixth edition of 1953 being reprinted by Princeton University Press in 1991 with an introduction by Thomas Banchoff. Flatland is an account of the adventures of A Square in Lineland and Spaceland. In it Abbott tries to popularise the notion of multidimensional geometry but the book is also a clever satire on the social, moral, and religious values of the period.
More recently, in 2002, an annotated version of Flatland has been produced with an introduction and notes by Ian Stewart who gives extensive discussion of mathematical topics related to passages in Abbott's text. *SAU
The Kindle edition of Flatland is available for less than $2.00 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions [Illustrated]
and the Stewart version is only a little more:
and the Stewart version is only a little more:
1936 William Sheppard read Mathematics at Cambridge and then went on to study Law. He was appointed to the Department of Education. His mathematical interests were mainly in Statistics. *SAU
1984 Georgii Dmitrievic Suvorov (19 May 1919, 12 Oct 1984) made major contributions to the theory of functions. He worked, in particular, on the theory of topological and metric mappings on 2-dimensional space. Another area on which Suvorov worked was the theory of conformal mappings and quasi-formal mappings. His results in this area, mostly from the late 1960s when he was at Donetsk, are of particular significance. He extended Lavrentev's results in this area, in particular Lavrentev's stability and differentiability theorems, to more general classes of transformations. One of the many innovations in Suvorov's work was new methods which he introduced to help in the understanding of metric properties of mappings with bounded Dirichlet integral. *SAU
2011 Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941; found dead October 12, 2011), was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the 'R' in K&R C and commonly known by his username dmr. *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
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