E. Torricelli
The 298th day of the year; If you multiply 298 by (298 + 3) you get a palindromic number, 89,698. Can every number be similarly adjusted to make a palindrome? And this one is not just a Palindrome, it's a strobogrammatic one, rotate it 180 degrees and you get another palindrome, 86968. (Some restrict the term stobogram only to numbers that recreate themselves after rotation, and prefer ambigram for the ones that rotate to make a different number.)
6 x 298 +/- 1 are twin primes. The 55th number of the year for which this is true.
298 = \( {12 \choose 1} + {12 \choose 2} + {12 \choose 3} \) This is related to the Egg Drop numbers
298 = \( {12 \choose 1} + {12 \choose 2} + {12 \choose 3} \) This is related to the Egg Drop numbers
1666 William Lilly, astrologer, was called before the House of Commons to explain the embarrassing success of his 1651 prediction of the plague (of 1665) and “exorbitant fire” of 1666. The House ultimately attributed the fire to the papists. *W W Rouse Ball, Mathematical Recreations and Essays,6th edition, p. 390 Lilly caused much controversy in 1652 for allegedly predicting the Great Fire of London some 14 years before it happened. For this reason many people believed that he might have started the fire, but there is no evidence to support these claims. He was tried for the offense in Parliament but was found to be innocent.*Wik
In 1671, Giovanni Cassini discovered Iapetus, one of Saturn's moons. Iapetus is the third largest and one of the stranger of the 18 moons of Saturn. Its leading side is dark with a slight reddish color while its trailing side is bright. The dark surface might be composed of matter that was either swept up from space or oozed from the moon's interior. This difference is so striking that Cassini noted that he could see Iapetus only on one side of Saturn and not on the other. In Greek mythology Iapetus was a Titan, the son of Uranus, the father of Prometheus and Atlas and an ancestor of the human race. Cassini (1625-1712), first director of the Paris Royal Observatory, also discovered other moons of Saturn (Tethys, Dione, Rhea) and the major gap in its rings. *TIS
The two views of Lapetus
1713 Leibniz, in a letter to Johann Bernoulli, observed that an alternating series whose terms monotonically decrease to zero in absolute value is convergent. In a letter of January 10, 1714, he gave an incorrect proof (Big Kline, p. 461). Examination of the proof reveals that it is the one we give today, except he fails to say anything about the completeness of the reals. *VFR
1846 William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) writes to Sir George Stokes regarding the "recent proceedings about Oceanus, or Neptune, or Le Verrier. " commenting that "Cambridge is behind the rest of the world on scientific subjects.". John C. Adams, later became a fellow at Pembroke College, and he and Stokes became close friends. *The correspondence between Sir George Gabriel Stokes and Sir William Thompson, pg 2
1881 Clerk Seaton writes to the chairman of the committee on the census that he has discovered a paradox with the apportionment. Seaton had discovered the Alabama Paradox.
It seemed so easy. The 1787 US Constitution laid out simple rules for deciding how many representatives each state shall receive:*pballew.net
"Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, ... The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative ..."
It may have seemed easy, but for the 200+ years of US government, the question of "Who gets how many?" continues to perplex and promote controversy.
When congress discussed mathematical methods of applying this constitutional directive there were two methods of prime consideration, Jefferson's method, and Hamilton's method. Congress selected Hamilton's method and in the first use of the Presidential veto (make a note of this for extra points in History or Government class) President Washington rejected the bill. Congress submitted and passed another bill using Jefferson's method. The method used has changed frequently over the years with a method by Daniel Webster adopted in 1842, (the original 65 Representatives had grown to 223) and then replaced with Hamilton's method in 1852 (234 Representatives). In a strange "Only in America" moment in 1872, the congress reapportioned without actually adopting an official method and some analysis suggest that the difference caused Rutherford Hayes to Win instead of Samuel Tilden who would have won had Hamilton's method been used. Since 1931 the US House has had 435 Representatives with the brief exception of when Alaska and Hawaii became states. Then there was a temporary addition of one seat for each until the new apportionment after the 1960 Census. In 1941 the Huntington-Hill Method was adopted and has remained in continuous (and contentious) use ever since.
In 1880 the first of what are called the apportionment paradoxes was discovered. Here is how they state it at the Wikipedia web site:
After the 1880 census, C. W. Seaton, chief clerk of the U. S. Census Office, computed apportionment for all House sizes between 275 and 350, and discovered that Alabama would get 8 seats with a House size of 299 but only 7 with a House size of 300. In general the term Alabama paradox refers to any apportionment scenario where increasing the total number of items would decrease one of the shares. They also show a nice example (with small numbers) so you might check their site.
In 1872, Chief Clerk of the Census Charles Seaton invented a simple machine that made tabulating census data easier by keeping the lines on large tallying sheets isolated and organized. The Census Office purchased Seaton's device and used it to finish the 1870 census. Seaton served as superintendent of the 1880 census, during which his device was used again.
Even with the Seaton device, the 1880 census took nearly the entire decade to tabulate and publish. Census data had become too extensive to be effectively counted by hand. Luckily, a technological advancement in data processing was on the horizon.*Wik
1904 The first K&E Pocket watch slide rule patent was approved. Prior to this time K&E sold French made Boucher designs. The patent is in the name of Elmer A. Sperry, co-inventor of the gyrocompass. The patent covers the use of the ‘S’ and ‘L’ dials
and the geared hands and dials . *Oughtred Society
1944 Max Planck writes to Hitler to plead for the life of his son, Erwin. In the note, the discoverer of the energy quantum pleads for the life of his son, who was involved in the attempted to kill Hitler three months before. Max Planck had already lost his eldest son, who was killed in the Battle of Verdun, during World War I.
Planck writes in his letter that he is ‘confident’ that the Führer will lend his ear to ‘an imploring 87-year-old’. This plea, apparently written from the Planck family’s bombed-out home in a suburb of Berlin, was ignored by the authorities. Erwin was executed on 23 January 1945, and his death certificate recorded: ‘parents unknown’. *Graham Farmelo
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2001 Microsoft Releases Windows XP, the family of 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The name "XP" stands for “Experience.” The successor to both Windows 2000 Professional and Windows ME, Windows XP was the first consumer-oriented operating system Microsoft built on the Windows NT kernel and architecture. Over 400 million copies were in use by January 2006, according to an International Data Corporation analyst. It was succeeded by Windows Vista, which was released to the general public in January 2007*CHM
2011 Scientists in California and Sweden have solved a 250-year-old mystery — a coded manuscript written by a secret society. The University of Southern California announced Tuesday, Oct 25th, that researchers had broken the Copiale Cipher — the writing used in a 105-page 18th century document from Germany.
Kevin Knight, of USC, and Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer, of Uppsala University, did the work.
They used a statistical computer program to decipher part of the manuscript, which was found in East Berlin after the Cold War and is now in a private collection.
The book, written in symbols and Roman letters, details complicated initiation ceremonies of a society fascinated by ophthalmology. They include making mystical signs and plucking a hair from a candidate's eyebrow. The convoluted text swears candidates to loyalty and secrecy. *Associated Press,
1789 Samuel Heinrich Schwabe (25 Oct 1789; 11 Apr 1875) Amateur German astronomer who discovered the 10-year sunspot activity cycle. Schwabe had been looking for possible intramercurial planets. From 11 Oct 1825, for 42 years, he observed the Sun virtually every day that the weather allowed. In doing so he accumulated volumes of sunspot drawings, the idea being to detect his hypothetical planet as it passed across the solar disk, without confusion with small sunspots. Schwabe did not discover any new planet. Instead, he published his results in 1842 that his 17 years of nearly continuous sunspot observations revealed a 10-year periodicity in the number of sunspots visible on the solar disk. Schwabe also made (1831) the first known detailed drawing of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.*TIS
1811 Evariste Galois born in the little village of Bourg-la-Reine, near Paris, France. *VFR (25 Oct 1811; 31 May 1832) famous for his contributions to the part of higher algebra known as group theory. His theory solved many long-standing unanswered questions, including the impossibility of trisecting the angle and squaring the circle. Galois fought a duel with Perscheux d'Herbinville on 30 May 1832, the reason for the duel not being clear but certainly linked with a love affair. Galois was wounded in the duel, and died in hospital the following day, at age 20. His funeral was held on 2 June. It was the focus for a Republican rally and riots followed which lasted for several days. He was commemorated as a revolutionary and geometrician on a French postal stamp issued on 10 Nov 1984.*TIS
Joseph Liouville’s introduction to the reprinting of the papers and letter of Évariste Galois, Journal de Mathématiques pures et appliquées, vol. 11, 1846 (Linda Hall Library)
1877 Henry Norris Russell (25 Oct 1877; 18 Feb 1957) American astronomer and astrophysicist who showed the relationship between a star's brightness and its spectral type, in what is usually called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, and who also devised a means of computing the distances of binary stars. As student, professor, observatory director, and active professor emeritus, Russell spent six decades at Princeton University. From 1921, he visited Mt. Wilson Observatory annually. He analyzed light from eclipsing binary stars to determine stellar masses. Russell measured parallaxes and popularized the distinction between giant stars and "dwarfs" while developing an early theory of stellar evolution. Russell was a dominant force in American astronomy as a teacher, writer, and advisor. *TIS
1884 Motonori Matuyama, ( October 25, 1884 – January 27, 1958) a Japanese geophysicist, was born Oct. 25, 1884. In 1929, Matuyama made the rather bold suggestion that the Earth's magnetic field had once been reversed from its present orientation, so that at one time, a compass needle would have pointed south instead of north. His evidence came from igneous rocks in Japan and Manchuria, which indicated by their residual magnetic fields that, when they cooled millions of years ago, the Earth's north magnetic pole had been in the vicinity of the south geographic pole. As it turns out, the same suggestion had been made once before, by a French physicist, Bernard Brunhes, in 1905. Neither man made many converts, which is not surprising, since at the time the source of the Earth’s magnetic field was poorly understood, and radiometric dating was in its infancy. However, in 1959, it was proposed once again that the Earth's magnetic field reversed itself periodically, and by 1963 the evidence for it was being used to demonstrate the reality of sea-floor spreading and lay the basis for plate tectonics.
We now know that for the past .78 million years, the Earth's magnetic field has been normal (magnetic north being north), and that before this period, from 2.6 million to .78 million years ago, the magnetic field was reversed. The period between reversals is called a "chron", and the last chron before the present one, when the field was reversed, is called the Matuyama chron, in honor of our scientist of the day. The present chron is named the Brunhes chron, after the other early proponent of the idea of geomagnetic reversals. The last reversal, which occurred .78 million years ago, is called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. There were other chrons and other reversals before the Brunhes and the Matuyama, and they carry the names of Carl Friedrich Gauss and William Gilbert and other pioneers in the study of the earth's magnetism. We see above a simple chart that shows the last four chrons (second image). You will note that there are short-lived mini-reversals within each chron, such as the Jaramillo event within the Matuyama chron; the second chart shows how our understanding of the complexity of Earth’s magnetic reversals progressed in just the first decade of plate tectonics.
Matuyama’s paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Japan for 1929. We have this volume in the Library’s serials collection.
Dr. William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
I have recently seen scientific articles predicting that the Earth is nearing another flip. (2023)
1886 Lester Randolph Ford (25 Oct 1886 in Missouri, USA - 11 Nov 1967 in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA) was an American mathematician who lectured for several years in Edinburgh before moving back to the USA. He wrote some important text-books and is best known for his contributions to the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Monthly. *SAU (Ford circles are named after him. If you have never explored this idea, and the related idea of mediants, do it today)
1910 William Higinbotham (Oct 1910; 10 Nov 1994) American physicist who invented the first video game, Tennis for Two, as entertainment for the 1958 visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked (1947-84) then as head of the Instrumentation Division. It used a small analogue computer with ten direct-connected operational amplifiers and output a side view of the curved flight of the tennis ball on an oscilloscope only five inches in diameter. Each player had a control knob and a button. Late in WW II he became electronics group leader at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the nuclear bomb was developed. After the war, he became active with other nuclear scientists in establishing the Federation of American Scientists to promote nuclear n)on-proliferation.*TIS (raise your hand if you are old enough to remember "Pong")
1910 William Higinbotham (Oct 1910; 10 Nov 1994) American physicist who invented the first video game, Tennis for Two, as entertainment for the 1958 visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked (1947-84) then as head of the Instrumentation Division. It used a small analogue computer with ten direct-connected operational amplifiers and output a side view of the curved flight of the tennis ball on an oscilloscope only five inches in diameter. Each player had a control knob and a button. Late in WW II he became electronics group leader at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the nuclear bomb was developed. After the war, he became active with other nuclear scientists in establishing the Federation of American Scientists to promote nuclear n)on-proliferation.*TIS (raise your hand if you are old enough to remember "Pong")
1945 David N. Schramm (25 Oct 1945; 19 Dec 1997) American theoretical astrophysicist who was an authority on the particle-physics aspects of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. He considered the nuclear physics involved in the synthesis of the light elements created during the Big Bang comprising mainly hydrogen, with lesser quantities of deuterium, helium, lithium, beryllium and boron. He predicted, from cosmological considerations, that a third family of neutrinos existed - which was later proven in particle accelerator experiments (1989). Schramm worked to evaluate undetected dark matter that contributed to the mass of the universe, and which would determine whether the universe would ultimately continue to expand. He died in the crash of the small airplane he was piloting. *TIS
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1972 Esther Duflo, FBA (French: [dyflo]; born 25 October 1972) is a French–American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), founded in 2003 and supported by Community Jameel; holds the Poverty and Public Policy chair at the Collège de France since 2022; and is president of the Paris School of Economics since 2024.She shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee[18] and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
Duflo is a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) research associate, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research's development economics program. Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, published in April 2011 and November 2019, respectively. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Duflo is the seventh most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.
Duflo is a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) research associate, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research's development economics program. Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, published in April 2011 and November 2019, respectively. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Duflo is the seventh most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.
1400 Geoffrey Chaucer died. Although rightly famous for his Canterbury Tales, he also wrote two astronomical works. *VFR In his lifetime he was far more known for his “Treatise on the Astrolabe”
1647 Evangelista Torricelli (15 Oct 1608- 25 Oct 1647) an Italian physicist and mathematician who invented the barometer and whose work in geometry aided in the eventual development of integral calculus. Inspired by Galileo's writings, he wrote a treatise on mechanics, De Motu ("Concerning Movement"), which impressed Galileo. He also developed techniques for producing telescope lenses. The barometer experiment using "quicksilver" filling a tube then inverted into a dish of mercury, carried out in Spring 1644, made Torricelli's name famous. The Italian scientists merit was, above all, to admit that the effective cause of the resistance presented by nature to the creation of a vacuum (in the inverted tube above the mercury) was probably due to the weight of air*TIS
1733 Girolamo Saccheri (5 Sep 1667, 25 Oct 1733) Italian mathematician who worked to prove the fifth postulate of Euclid, which can be stated as, "Through any point not on a given line, one and only one line can be drawn that is parallel to the given line." Euclid saw the proof was not self-evident, yet neither did he provide one; instead he accepted it as an assumption. Subsequently many mathematicians tried to prove this fifth postulate from the remained axioms - and failed. Saccheri took the novel approach of first assuming that the postulate was wrong, then followed the all consequences seeking any one contradiction that then leaves the only original postulate as the only possible solution. In the process, he came close to discovering non-Euclidian geometry, but gave up too early.*TIS
1884 Carlo Alberto Castigliano (9 November 1847, Asti – 25 October 1884, Milan) was an Italian mathematician and physicist known for Castigliano's method for determining displacements in a linear-elastic system based on the partial derivatives of strain energy.*Wik
1905 Otto Stolz (3 May 1842 in Hall (now Solbad Hall in Tirol), Austria - 25 Oct 1905 in Innsbruck, Austria) Stolz's earliest papers were concerned with analytic or algebraic geometry, including spherical trigonometry. He later dedicated an increasing part of his research to real analysis, in particular to convergence problems in the theory of series, including double series; to the discussion of the limits of indeterminate ratios; and to integration.*SAU
1914 Wilhelm Lexis studied data presented as a series over time thus initiating the study of time series.*SAU
1933 Albert Wangerin worked on potential theory, spherical functions and differential geometry. *SAU
1996 Ennio de Giorgi (Lecce, February 8, 1928 – Pisa, October 25, 1996) was an Italian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and the foundations of mathematics.*SAU
2002 René Frédéric Thom (September 2, 1923 – October 25, 2002) was a French mathematician. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became world-famous among the wider academic community and the educated general public for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory (later developed by Erik Christopher Zeeman). He received the Fields Medal in 1958.*Wik
2022 Marta Cavallo Bunge (1938 – 25 October 2022) was an Argentine-Canadian mathematician specializing in category theory, and known for her work on synthetic calculus of variations and synthetic differential topology. She was a professor emeritus at McGill University
With her doctoral student Jonathon Funk, Bunge is the co-author of Singular Coverings of Toposes (Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1890, Springer, 2006). With Felipe Gago and Ana María San Luis, Bunge is the co-author of Synthetic Differential Topology (London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series 448, Cambridge University Press, 2018).
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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