Folium of Descartes, *Wiki
Die ganze Zahl schuf der liebe Gott, alles Übrige ist Menschenwerk.
God made the integers, all else is the work of man.
~Leopold Kronecker
The 363rd day of the year; 363 is the sum of nine consecutive primes and is also the sum of 5 consecutive powers of three. It is the last palindrome of the year.
363 =
363 is the numerator of the sum of the reciprocals of the first seven integers,
1566 A part of Tycho Brahe’s nose was cut off in a duel with another Danish nobleman. The dispute was over a point of mathematics. This he replaced with a prosthesis generally stated to be of silver and gold but containing a high copper content. *VFR
On December 10, 1566, Tycho and the Danish blue blood Manderup Parsbjerg were guests at an engagement party at Prof. Bachmeister in Rostock. The party included a ball, but the festive environment did not keep the two men from starting an argument that went on even over the Christmas period. On December 29, they finished the matter with a rapier duel. During the duel, which started at 7 p.m. in total darkness, a large portion of the nose of Brahe was cut off by his Opponent. It was the most famous cut in science, if not the unkindest. *Neatorama
His body was exhumed in 1901, and modern medical assessment is that his death was more likely caused by either a burst bladder, prostatic hypertrophy, acute prostatitis, or prostate cancer, which led to urinary retention, overflow incontinence, and uremia.
In February 2010, the Prague city authorities approved a request by Danish scientists to exhume the remains, and in November 2010 a group of Czech and Danish scientists from Aarhus University collected bone, hair and clothing samples for analysis.[64][65] The scientists, led by Jens Vellev, analyzed Tycho's beard hair once again. The team reported in November 2012 that not only was there not enough mercury present to substantiate murder, but that there were no lethal levels of any poisons present. The team's conclusion was that "it is impossible that Tycho Brahe could have been murdered". *Wik
Whilst Brahe was still within his coffin, his famous nose was not. Frustratingly, it appeared that he was either buried without it, or with one that easily decomposed.
1692 Huygens, in a letter to L’Hospital, gave the first complete sketch of the folium of Descartes. Although the curve was first discussed 23 August 1638 no complete sketch had previously been given due to a reluctance to use negative numbers as coordinates. *VFR
1763 Nevil Maskelyne wrote his brother Edmund, reporting his safe arrival on 7 November after “an agreeable passage of 6 weeks”. He noted that he had been “very sufficiently employed in making the observations recommended to me by the Commissioners of Longitude” and that it was at times “rather too fatiguing”.
The Princess Louise sailed for Barbados on 23 September. During the voyage Maskelyne and Charles Green took many lunar-distance observations (with Maskelyne later claiming that his final observation was within half of degree of the truth) and struggled a couple of times with the marine chair. Maskelyne’s conclusion was that the Jupiter’s satellites method of finding longitude would simply never work at sea because the telescope magnification required was far too high for use in a moving ship.
*Board of Longitude project, Greenwich
A marine chair made by Christopher Irwin that was intended to steady an observer to allow him to measure the positions of Jupiter’s satellites at sea. (Eclipses of Jupiter’s moons were already used as a celestial timekeeper* to determine longitude on land: these were the observations Maskelyne made at Barbados.)
1746 Euler writes to praise d'Alembert on his proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, but disagrees with his idea that log(-x) = log (x).
1766 Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist, was born Dec. 29, 1766, in Glasgow, Scotland. *Linda Hall Org
1790 Obituary for Thomas “Tom” Fuller in the Columbian Centinial , Boston Massachusetts. His mathematical ability and its origin became a dueling point between abolitionists and those supporting slavery.
*Univ of Buffalo Math Dept
Died- Negro Tom, the famous African Calculator, aged 80 years. He was the property of Mrs. Elizabeth Cox of Alexandria. Tom was a very black man. He was brought to this country at the age of 14, and was sold as a slave.... This man was a prodigy. Though he could never read or write, he had perfectly acquired the art of enumeration.... He could multiply seven into itself, that product by seven, and the products, so produced, by seven, for seven times. He could give the number of months, days, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds in any period of time that any person chose to mention, allowing in his calculation for all leap years that happened in the time; he would give the number of poles, yards, feet, inches, and barley-corns in any distance, say the diameter of the earth's orbit; and in every calculation he would produce the true answer in less time than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would produce with their pens. And, what was, perhaps, more extraordinary, though interrupted in the progress of his calculation, and engaged in discourse necessary for him to begin again, but he would ... cast up plots of land. He took great notice of the lines of land which he had seen surveyed. He drew just conclusions from facts; surprisingly so, for his opportunities. Had his [Thomas Fuller] opportunity been equal to those of thousands of his fellow-men ... even a NEWTON himself, need have ashamed to acknowledge him a Brother in Science.
*Univ of Buffalo Math Dept
In 1927, Krakatoa began a new volcanic eruption on the seafloor along the same line as the cones of previous activity. By 26 Jan 1928, a growing cone had reached sea level and formed a small island called Anak Krakatoa (Child of Krakatoa). Sporadic activity continued until, by 1973, the island had reached a height of 622 ft above sea level. It was still in eruption in the early 1980s. The volcano Krakatoa is on Pulau (island) Rakata in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, Indonesia. It had been quiet since its previous catastrophic eruption of 1883. That threw pumice 33 miles high and 36,380 people were killed either by the ash fall or by the resulting tidal wave. The only earlier known eruption was in 1680, and was only moderate.*TIS
Anak Krakatoa began another eruption cycle on 15 September 2023., with white gas-and-steam plumes as high as 100 m above Krakatau’s summit on most days during 15-21 September and drifting NW, N, and NE. White-and-gray plumes rose as high as 100 m and drifted NW on 21 November. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4), and the public was warned to stay at least 5 km away from the crater.
1939 Shockley Makes Historic Notebook Entry
William Shockley records in his laboratory notebook that it should be possible to replace vacuum tubes with semiconductors. Eight years later, he, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen at AT&T Bell Laboratories successfully tested the point-contact transistor. Shockley developed much of the theory behind transistor action, and soon postulated the junction transistor, a much more reliable device. It took about ten years after the 1947 discovery before transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer design as manufacturers learned to make them reliable and a new generation of engineers learned how to use them. *CHM
William Shockley (seated), John Bardeen(standing left), and Walter Brattain.
1947 George Dantzig announced his discovery of the simplex method at the joint annual meeting of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The lecture was poorly attended and the result attracted no interest. *Robert Dorfman, “The discovery of linear programming,” Annals of the History of Computing, 6(1984), 283–295, esp. 292.
The Simplex method is an approach to solving linear programming models by hand using slack variables, tableaus, and pivot variables as a means to finding the optimal solution of an optimization problem.The name of the algorithm is derived from the concept of a simplex (the simplest shape in each dimension, point, line segment, triangle, and tetrahedron for Dimensions 1 through four.) and was suggested by T. S. Motzkin.
1979 Edward Lorenz presents a paper at the 139th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the title, "Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" *TIS According to Lorenz, upon failing to provide a title for a talk he was to present at the meeting Philip Merilees concocted the title. The idea that one butterfly could have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent events seems first to have appeared in a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel. It seems that Merilees was was not familiar with Bradbury’s story. *Wik Found this cartoon @NewYorker
1256 Birthdate of Ibn Al-Banna who studied the magic properties of numbers and letters. *VFR He was an Islamic mathematician who wrote a large number of works including an introduction to Euclid's Elements, an algebra text and various works on astronomy.*SAU
Ibn al-Banna' wrote over 100 works encompassing such varied topics as Astronomy, Astrology, the division of inheritances, Linguistics, Logic, Mathematics, Meteorology, Rhetoric, Tafsir, Usūl al-Dīn and Usul al-Fiqh.[8] One of his works, called Talkhīṣ ʿamal al-ḥisāb (Arabic: تلخيص أعمال الحساب) (Summary of arithmetical operations), includes topics such as fractions and sums of squares and cubes. *Wik
1751 John Bonnycastle (baptized 29 December 1751 in Hardwick or Whitchurch, England – 15 May 1821 in Woolwich, England) was an English teacher of mathematics and author.
John Bonnycastle was born in Buckinghamshire, in about 1750. Nothing is known of his family or early life, but he went to London where he established an Academy. He became a tutor to the two sons of the Earl of Pontefract at Easton in Northumberland. Between 1782 and 1785, he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where he remained until his death on 15 May 1821.
He was a prolific writer, and wrote for the early volumes of Rees's Cyclopædia, about algebra, analysis and astronomy.
On Oct.7th, 1786 he married Brigette Newell with whom he had six children Charlotte, William, Mary, Sir Richard (Royal Engineer/Author), Humphrey and Charles.
His son Richard Henry Bonnycastle settled in Canada, where the family became quite well known in Winnipeg and Calgary.
His son, Charles Bonnycastle (1796-1840) became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia.
1796 Johann Christian Poggendorff (29 December 1796 – 24 January 1877), was a German physicist and science historian born in Hamburg. By far the greater and more important part of his work related to electricity and magnetism. Poggendorff is known for his electrostatic motor which is analogous to Wilhelm Holtz's electrostatic machine. In 1841 he described the use of the potentiometer for measurement of electrical potentials without current draw.
Even at this early period he had conceived the idea of founding a physical and chemical scientific journal, and the realization of this plan was hastened by the sudden death of Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert, the editor of Gilbert's Annalen der Physik, in 1824 Poggendorff immediately put himself in communication with the publisher, Barth of Leipzig. He became editor of Annalen der Physik und Chemie, which was to be a continuation of Gilbert's Annalen on a somewhat extended plan. Poggendorff was admirably qualified for the post, and edited the journal for 52 years, until 1876. In 1826, Poggendorff developed the mirror galvanometer, a device for detecting electric currents.
He had an extraordinary memory, well stored with scientific knowledge, both modern and historical, a cool and impartial judgment, and a strong preference for facts as against theory of the speculative kind. He was thus able to throw himself into the spirit of modern experimental science. He possessed in abundant measure the German virtue of orderliness in the arrangement of knowledge and in the conduct of business. Further he had an engaging geniality of manner and much tact in dealing with men. These qualities soon made Poggendorff's Annalen (abbreviation: Pogg. Ann.) the foremost scientific journal in Europe.
In the course of his fifty-two years editorship of the Annalen Poggendorff could not fail to acquire an unusual acquaintance with the labors of modern men of science. This knowledge, joined to what he had gathered by historical reading of equally unusual extent, he carefully digested and gave to the world in his Biographisch-literarisches Handworterbuch zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften, containing notices of the lives and labors of mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, and chemists, of all peoples and all ages. This work contains an astounding collection of facts invaluable to the scientific biographer and historian. The first two volumes were published in 1863; after his death a third volume appeared in 1898, covering the period 1858-1883, and a fourth in 1904, coming down to the beginning of the 20th century.
His literary and scientific reputation speedily brought him honorable recognition. In 1830 he was made royal professor, in 1838 Hon. Ph.D. and extraordinary professor in the University of Berlin, and in 1839 member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. In 1845, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Many offers of ordinary professorships were made to him, but he declined them all, devoting himself to his duties as editor of the Annalen, and to the pursuit of his scientific researches. He died at Berlin on 24 January 1877.
The Poggendorff Illusion is an optical illusion that involves the brain's perception of the interaction between diagonal lines and horizontal and vertical edges. It is named after Poggendorff, who discovered it in the drawing of Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner, in which he showed the Zöllner illusion in 1860. In the picture to the right, a straight black line is obscured by a dark gray rectangle. The black line appears disjointed, although it is in fact straight; the second picture illustrates this fact.*Wik
1856 Birth of Thomas Jan Stieltjes, who did pioneering work on the integral. *VFR Thomas Stieltjes worked on almost all branches of analysis, continued fractions and number theory. *SAU
1861 Kurt Hensel (29 Dec 1861 in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) - 1 June 1941 in Marburg, Germany) invented the p-adic numbers, an algebraic theory which has proved important in later applications. From 1901 Hensel was editor of the prestigious and influential Crelle's Journal.*SAU
1879 Ellen Gleditsch (Dec 29, 1879 -June 5, 1968) was a Norwegian radiochemist and Norway's second female professor. Starting her career as an assistant to Marie Curie, she became a pioneer in radiochemistry, establishing the half-life of radium and helping demonstrate the existence of isotopes.
A wonderful story of her life by Dava Sobel is at the Linda Hall Library.
Even at this early period he had conceived the idea of founding a physical and chemical scientific journal, and the realization of this plan was hastened by the sudden death of Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert, the editor of Gilbert's Annalen der Physik, in 1824 Poggendorff immediately put himself in communication with the publisher, Barth of Leipzig. He became editor of Annalen der Physik und Chemie, which was to be a continuation of Gilbert's Annalen on a somewhat extended plan. Poggendorff was admirably qualified for the post, and edited the journal for 52 years, until 1876. In 1826, Poggendorff developed the mirror galvanometer, a device for detecting electric currents.
He had an extraordinary memory, well stored with scientific knowledge, both modern and historical, a cool and impartial judgment, and a strong preference for facts as against theory of the speculative kind. He was thus able to throw himself into the spirit of modern experimental science. He possessed in abundant measure the German virtue of orderliness in the arrangement of knowledge and in the conduct of business. Further he had an engaging geniality of manner and much tact in dealing with men. These qualities soon made Poggendorff's Annalen (abbreviation: Pogg. Ann.) the foremost scientific journal in Europe.
In the course of his fifty-two years editorship of the Annalen Poggendorff could not fail to acquire an unusual acquaintance with the labors of modern men of science. This knowledge, joined to what he had gathered by historical reading of equally unusual extent, he carefully digested and gave to the world in his Biographisch-literarisches Handworterbuch zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften, containing notices of the lives and labors of mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, and chemists, of all peoples and all ages. This work contains an astounding collection of facts invaluable to the scientific biographer and historian. The first two volumes were published in 1863; after his death a third volume appeared in 1898, covering the period 1858-1883, and a fourth in 1904, coming down to the beginning of the 20th century.
His literary and scientific reputation speedily brought him honorable recognition. In 1830 he was made royal professor, in 1838 Hon. Ph.D. and extraordinary professor in the University of Berlin, and in 1839 member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. In 1845, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The Poggendorff Illusion is an optical illusion that involves the brain's perception of the interaction between diagonal lines and horizontal and vertical edges. It is named after Poggendorff, who discovered it in the drawing of Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner, in which he showed the Zöllner illusion in 1860. In the picture to the right, a straight black line is obscured by a dark gray rectangle. The black line appears disjointed, although it is in fact straight; the second picture illustrates this fact.*Wik
1856 Birth of Thomas Jan Stieltjes, who did pioneering work on the integral. *VFR Thomas Stieltjes worked on almost all branches of analysis, continued fractions and number theory. *SAU
1861 Kurt Hensel (29 Dec 1861 in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) - 1 June 1941 in Marburg, Germany) invented the p-adic numbers, an algebraic theory which has proved important in later applications. From 1901 Hensel was editor of the prestigious and influential Crelle's Journal.*SAU
1879 Ellen Gleditsch (Dec 29, 1879 -June 5, 1968) was a Norwegian radiochemist and Norway's second female professor. Starting her career as an assistant to Marie Curie, she became a pioneer in radiochemistry, establishing the half-life of radium and helping demonstrate the existence of isotopes.
A wonderful story of her life by Dava Sobel is at the Linda Hall Library.
1905 Henri-Gaston Busignies (29 Dec 1905; 20 Jun 1981) French-born American electronics engineer whose invention (1936) of high-frequency direction finders (HF/DF, or "Huff Duff") permitted the U.S. Navy during World War II to detect enemy transmissions and quickly pinpoint the direction from which a radio transmission was coming. Busignies invented the radiocompass (1926) while still a student at Jules Ferry College in Versailles, France. In 1934, he started developing the direction finder based on his earlier radiocompass. Busignies developed the moving target indicator for wartime radar. It scrubbed off the radar screen every echo from stationary objects and left only echoes from moving objects, such as aircraft. *TIS
1911 (Emil) Klaus (Julius) Fuchs (29 Dec 1911; 28 Jan 1988) was a German-born physicist who was convicted as a spy on 1 Mar 1950, for passing nuclear research secrets to Russia. He fled from Nazi Germany to Britain. He was interned on the outbreak of WW II, but Prof. Max Born intervened on his behalf. Fuchs was released in 1942, naturalized in 1942 and joined the British atomic bomb research project. From 1943 he worked on the atom bomb with the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, U.S. By 1945, he was sending secrets to Russia. In 1946, he became head of theoretical physics at Harwell, UK. He was caught, confessed, tried, imprisoned for nine of a 14 year sentence, released on 23 Jun 1959, and moved to East Germany and resumed nuclear research until 1979. *TIS
1944 Joseph W. Dauben (born 29 December 1944, Santa Monica- ) is a Herbert H. Lehman Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
His fields of expertise are history of science, history of mathematics, the scientific revolution, sociology of science, intellectual history, 17-18th centuries, history of Chinese science, and the history of botany.
His book Abraham Robinson was reviewed positively by Moshé Machover, but he noted that it avoids discussing any of Robinson's negative aspects, and "in this respect [the book] borders on the hagiographic, painting a portrait without warts."
Dauben in a 1980 Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences (since 1982).
Dauben is an elected member (1991) of the International Academy of the History of Science and an elected foreign member (2001) of German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
He delivered an invited lecture at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin on Karl Marx's mathematical work. *Wik
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1720 Maria Winckelmann (Maria Margarethe Winckelmann Kirch (25 Feb 1670 in Panitzsch, near Leipzig, Germany - 29 Dec 1720 in Berlin, Germany) was a German astronomer who helped her husband, Gottfried Kirch, with his observations. She was the first woman to discover a comet.*SAU
Gottfried Kirch, having trained his own three sisters in astronomy, now was able to work with his wife who was already a trained astronomer. Gottfried made a living from producing calendars, which he had done from 1667, and ephemerides so it was natural for him to teach his wife Maria to assist him in these tasks. In case the reader thinks of a calendar as simply giving the days of the week together with a pretty picture for each month, we should explain that the Kirch calendars included information on the phases of the moon, the setting of the sun, eclipses, and the position of the sun and the planets. The two worked as a team and, although they were probably equally skilled as astronomers, the social status of women at this time required that Maria Kirch acted as her husband's assistant rather than partner. Indeed this is exactly what she did and, when she discovered a comet on 21 April 1702, it was her husband who was credited with the discovery.
Called the Great Comet of 1680, Kirch's Comet, and Newton's Comet, was the first comet discovered by telescope. The orbit of the comet of 1680, fit to a parabola, as shown in Isaac Newton's Principia
1731 Brook Taylor (18 Aug 1685, 29 Dec 1731) British mathematician, best known for the Taylor's series, a method for expanding functions into infinite series. In 1708, Taylor produced a solution to the problem of the centre of oscillation. His Methodus incrementorum directa et inversa (1715; “Direct and Indirect Methods of Incrementation”) introduced what is now called the calculus of finite differences. Using this, he was the first to express mathematically the movement of a vibrating string on the basis of mechanical principles. Methodus also contained Taylor's theorem, later recognized (1772) by Lagrange as the basis of differential calculus. A gifted artist, Taylor also wrote on basic principles of perspective (1715) containing the first general treatment of the principle of vanishing points.*TIS
As the degree of the Taylor polynomial rises, it approaches the correct function. This image shows sin x and its Taylor approximations by polynomials of degree 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 at x = 0.
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| *Wik |
1737 Joseph Saurin (1659 at Courtaison – December 29, 1737 at Paris) was a French mathematician and a converted Protestant minister. He was the first to show how the tangents at the multiple points of curves could be determined by mathematical analysis. He was accused in 1712 by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau of being the actual author of defamatory verses that gossip had attributed to Rousseau.*Wik
1891 Leopold Kronecker (7 Dec 1823, 29 Dec 1891) died of a bronchial illness in Berlin, in his 69th year. A German mathematician who worked to unify arithmetic, algebra and analysis, with a particular interest in elliptic functions, algebraic equations, theory of numbers, theory of determinants and theory of simple and multiple integrals. However the topics he studied were restricted by the fact that he believed in the reduction of all mathematics to arguments involving only the integers and a finite number of steps. He believed that mathematics should deal only with finite numbers and with a finite number of operations. He was the first to doubt the significance of non-constructive existence proofs, and believed that transcendental numbers did not exist. The Kronecker delta function is named in his honour.*TIS
In 1841, at the age of 17, Kronecker began studying mathematics at the University of Berlin. He attended lectures by Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805-1859), Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804-1851) and Jakob Steiner (1796-1863). In 1843 he went to Bonn for a semester and then to Breslau for a year, where his former school teacher Kummer had now been appointed as a mathematics professor. After Kronecker returned to Berlin University in 1844, it was Dirichlet who had a lasting influence on him and from whom he received his doctorate with distinction in 1845 on a topic from algebraic number theory.
Kronecker then interrupted his scientific career for personal reasons. During this time he managed his family's agricultural estate in Silesia and liquidated his late uncle's banking business. He proved to be a capable entrepreneur who was not only able to maintain the considerable family fortune, but even increase it. In 1848 he married his cousin Fanny Prausnitzer. This marriage resulted in six children. In addition to his own offspring, Kronecker also looked after his younger brother Hugo, who later became a physiology professor in Bern.
During those years in rural Silesia, Kronecker was only able to do mathematics on the side. However, his lively correspondence with Kummer shows that he certainly found leisure to do mathematical research. His first publication from this time dates from 1853. The work “On algebraically solvable equations” made him world famous.
In 1855 Kronecker returned to Berlin as a wealthy private scholar. He was not looking for a position at the university, but rather an inspiring place where he could work scientifically together with other mathematicians. He published a large number of works in rapid succession. Within a year of Kronecker's return to Berlin, Kummer and Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass (1815-1897) were appointed professors at the University of Berlin. The following decades, which were characterized by the work of the three scholars Kronecker, Kummer and Weierstrass, are often referred to as the golden age of mathematics in Berlin.*Math.Berlin (With Hat tip to Martin Lukarevski)
1941 William James Macdonald (1851 in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Died: 29 Dec 1941 in Edinburgh, Scotland) graduated from the University of St Andrews. He taught at Madras College St Andrews, at Merchiston Castle School and at Donald Stewart's College in Edinburgh. He was a pioneer of the introduction of modern geometry to the mathematical curriculum. He was a founder member of the EMS and became the sixth President in 1887. *SAU
1941 Tullio Levi-Civita (29 Mar 1873, 29 Dec 1941) Italian mathematician who was one of the founders of absolute differential calculus (tensor analysis) which had applications to the theory of relativity. In 1887, he published a famous paper in which he developed the calculus of tensors. In 1900 he published, jointly with Ricci, the theory of tensors Méthodes de calcul differential absolu et leures applications in a form which was used by Einstein 15 years later. Weyl also used Levi-Civita's ideas to produce a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. In addition to the important contributions his work made in the theory of relativity, Levi-Civita produced a series of papers treating elegantly the problem of a static gravitational field. *TIS
1989 Adrien Albert (19 November 1907, Sydney - 29 December 1989, Canberra) was a leading authority in the development of medicinal chemistry in Australia. Albert also authored many important books on chemistry, including one on selective toxicity.
He was awarded BSc with first class honours and the University Medal in 1932 at the University of Sydney. He gained a PhD in 1937 and a DSc in 1947 from the University of London. His appointments included Lecturer at the University of Sydney (1938-1947), advisor to the Medical Directorate of the Australian Army (1942-1947), research at the Wellcome Research Institute in London (1947-1948) and in 1948 the Foundation Chair of Medical Chemistry in the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra where he established the Department of Medical Chemistry. He was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
He was the author of Selective Toxicity: The Physico-Chemical Basis of Therapy, first published by Chapman and Hall in 1951.
The Adrien Albert Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Sydney was established in his honour in 1989. His bequest funds the Adrien Albert Lectureship, awarded every two years by the Royal Society of Chemistry *Wik
1989 Hermann (Julius) Oberth (25 Jun 1894, 29 Dec 1989) was a German scientist who was one of three founders of space flight (with Tsiolkovsky and Goddard). After injury in WWI, he drafted a proposal for a long-range, liquid-propellant rocket, which the War Ministry dismissed as fanciful. Even his Ph.D. dissertation on his rocket design was rejected by the University of Heidelberg. When he published it as Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1923; “The Rocket into Interplanetary Space”) he gained recognition for its mathematical analysis of the rocket speed that would allow it to escape Earth's gravitational pull. He received a Romanian patent in 1931 for a liquid-propellant rocket design. His first such rocket was launched 7 May 1931, near Berlin. *TIS
2014 John Frankland Rigby (22 April 1933 – 29 December 2014) was an English mathematician and academic of the University College of South Wales, Cardiff, when it was part of the University of Wales, and of its successor Cardiff University.
Working in the field of geometry, he became an authority on the relationship between maths and ornamental art and was national Secretary of the Mathematical Association from 1989 to 1996.In 1959 Rigby was appointed to his first academic job, as a lecturer in the School of Mathematics of the University College of South Wales at Cardiff, and remained there until he retired in 1996, and beyond, as he continued to work part-time for some years. During his career, he contributed many papers on Euclidean geometry. He was also a leading authority on the interface between mathematics and ornamental art, especially Celtic art and Islamic geometric patterns, and took a close interest in traditional Japanese geometry.[2] He visited universities in several overseas countries, especially in Turkey, Japan, and the Philippines, and also in Singapore and Canada.
Rigby lectured on complex analysis, drawing complicated curves and perfect circles on the blackboard, where he could make "magnificently accurate diagrams". He was an active member of the Mathematical Association. In the 1970s he became President of its Cardiff Branch and then was national Secretary from 1989 to 1996, at conferences giving presentations of his work. He regularly provided solutions to problems raised in the Mathematical Gazette, and an obituary described his research papers as "distinguished by their precision, concise style, and freedom from jargon".
With Branko Grünbaum, Rigby realised the Grünbaum–Rigby configuration, and Ross Honsberger named a point in a theorem by Rigby "the Rigby point". Adrian Oldknow named inner and outer Rigby points in connection with Soddy triangles, with the Rigby points lying on the Soddy line.
In retirement, Rigby began to suffer from Parkinson's disease, but was still wanted for international conferences. With his friend James Wiegold, he took charge of Cardiff University's Mathematics Club for sixth formers, drawing in students from Cardiff High School, the Cathedral School, Llandaff, Howell's School, and schools in Monmouth. Those attending meetings might offer solutions to problems which could not be faulted, but Rigby "would produce far more elegant ones, drawing gasps of admiration from the audience".
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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