All models are wrong, some models are useful.
~George Box
The 291st day of the year; 291 is the largest number that is not the sum of distinct non-trivial powers.
The number of integers less than, and relatively prime to 291 is equal to it's reversal, 192.
291 is also equal to the nth prime + n.... but for which n, children?
Because 291 = 6 x 47 + 9, it can be written as the difference of two squares, 291 = 50^2 - 47^2. (An interesting note is that every power of 2^n is either one more or one less than some member of the 6n+9 sequence. The converse is not true, 21 is easy counterexample.
EVENTS
Walcher was from Lotharingia, a region influenced by the new scientific ideas coming from Spain, and arrived in England around 1091. Using an astrolabe to measure the time of several solar and lunar eclipses with an accuracy of about fifteen minutes, he computed a set of tables giving the time of the new moons from 1036 through 1111, which were considered important for medical astrology. His later observations revealed significant errors in his tables, reflecting the limitations of early medieval astronomical theory.
In his later De Dracone (ca. 1116), Walcher drew on the knowledge of Arabic astronomy that his master, Petrus Alfonsi, had brought from Spain. De Dracone discussed the motion of the lunar nodes (the head and tail of the dragon) and their significance for the computation of lunar and solar eclipses.In De Dracone, Walcher recorded angles in degrees, minutes, and seconds, although he wrote these numbers using Roman, rather than Arabic numerals.
Walcher was Prior of Malvern Priory from 1120 to 1135. Walcher's gravestone in St Anne's Chapel at the Priory Church records his abilities:
"In this chest lies Doctor Walcher, a worthy philosopher, a good astronomer, a Lotharingian, a pious and humble man, a monk, the prior of his sheepfold, a geometer and abacist. The people mourn, the clergy grieve on all sides. The first day of October brought death to this elderly man. May each believer pray that he may live in heaven. 1135."
As head of the Priory he would have been a very influential figure in the county of Worcestershire.*Wik
1604 On the night of Oct. 17/18, 1604, Johannes Kepler was viewing a triple conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, when he got his first glimpse of a nova, a new star. He did not discover the nova – it had first been glimpsed several days earlier – and it was not an unprecedented event, as there had been novae in 1572, 1596, and 1600. But Kepler’s name would get attached to this one, for several reasons. First, the star would grow in brightness until it was so powerful that it could be seen with the naked eye in the daytime. We now recognize it as a supernova, a term not used until the twentieth century. There has been no supernova like it since the nova of 1604, and it is referred to by astronomers as Kepler’s nova, or SN 1604.
Second, Kepler carefully measured the distance of the nova from half-a-dozen nearby stars, and would continue to do so for the course of an entire year, and he found that the nova did not shift even a minute of arc in its position (astronomers would say it exhibited no parallax, or shift in position), and that therefore it really was a star, out there with all the other stars, and not some nearby phenomenon. Aristotle had maintained that the heavens are immutable and do not change. Tycho Brahe had first argued against this Aristotelian doctrine, when he measured the position of the nova of 1572 (Tycho’s nova) and found that it exhibited no detectable parallax. So Kepler found new evidence to affirm Tycho’s conclusion.
Third, Kepler wrote and published a book about the new star. He called it De stella nova in pede serpentarii (The new star in the foot of Serpentarius, Kepler’s name for the constellation we now call Ophiuchus). The book contained a star map of Serpentarius and the surrounding constellations, which we reproduce here (first image). Several planets are labelled, as you can see in a detail (third image). Between the two feet of Serpentarius, the labels alpha (α) and eta (η) indicate the positions of Saturn and Jupiter, as they were seen on Dec. 17, 1603. The two are quite close together, in conjunction. This event, known as a Great Conjunction, was especially noteworthy for astrologers, as Jupiter and Saturn come into conjunction only once every twenty years. And it was why astronomers were looking so carefully at this part of the sky, and discovered the nova. *Linda Hall Org
1640 Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) explains his ‘little theorem’ to Bernard Frenicle de Bessey in a follow up to two previous letters. ("On the subject of progressions, I have sent to you in advance the propositions that serve to determine the properties of powers minus one"). The theorem, which states that np−1 ≡ 1 (mod p) if p is prime and relatively prime to n, was proved by Euler in 1736 by induction on n.[Scientific American, December 1982]
Fermat actually made three statements:
1) When the exponent, n, is composite, 2n-1 is also composite,
2) When the exponent, n, is prime, 2n -2 is divisible by 2*n,
3) When the exponent, n, is prime, the number 2n -1 can not be divided by any number less than 2n+1
*Jacqueline Stedall, Mathematics Emerging
Fermat actually made three statements:
1) When the exponent, n, is composite, 2n-1 is also composite,
2) When the exponent, n, is prime, 2n -2 is divisible by 2*n,
3) When the exponent, n, is prime, the number 2n -1 can not be divided by any number less than 2n+1
*Jacqueline Stedall, Mathematics Emerging
1740 In a letter to Johann Bernoulli, Euler uses imaginary in the exponent. exi + e-xi = 2 cos(x) {note Euler used square root of -1 rather than i. Euler would be the first to use i for the imaginary constant, but not until a paper he presents in St. Petersburg in 1777.} Cajori seems to imply, but does not state explicitly, that this is the first time an imaginary has been used as an exponent.
1933 Participants in the first fully international conference on nuclear physics in Rome from October 11–18, 1931, with those mentioned in the text in boldface. Foreground (left to right): Otto Stern (1888–1969), Peter Debye (1884–1966), Owen W. Richardson (1879–1959), Robert A. Millikan (1868–1973), Arthur H. Compton (1892–1962), Marie Curie (1867–1934), Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Francis W. Aston (1877–1945), Walther Bothe (1891–1957), Bruno Rossi (1905–1993), and Lise Meitner (1878–1968, obscured). Behind Stern and Debye is Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976, obscured), Lé on Brillouin (1889–1969), Patrick M.S. Blackett (1897–1974, above Brillouin), and John S.E. Townsend (1868–1957). Between Curie and Marconi is Jean Perrin (1870–1942) and behind him is Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) and Enrico Fermi (1901–1954). In the row just above Ehrenfest (not the top row) and to his left is (left to right) Emil Rupp (1898-1979), Quirino Majorana (1871–1957), and Antonio Garbasso (1871–1933). Above Marconi is Orso Mario Corbino (1876–1937), above Bohr is Giulio Cesare Trabacchi (1884–1959), and above and to the right of Aston against the wall in profile is Franco Rasetti (1901–2001). Behind and to the left of Meitner is Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1951). Among those missing from the photograph are Hans Geiger (1882–1945), Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958), and Lé on Rosenfeld. Source: Reale Accademia d'Italia, Atti dei Convegno (ref. 21), frontispiece.
It was the First Volta Congress — the First Volta Congress on Nuclear Physics.
The meeting’s program title is usually given as “Nuclei and Electrons” *PB
1954, Texas Instruments & Industrial Development Engineering Assoc launch the first transistor radio, Regency TR-1, (Like many other people, I listened to the beep of Sputnik overhead on one of these straining to see it in the sky above me...."beep...beep....")
1955, a new atomic subparticle called a negative proton (antiproton) was discovered at U.C. Berkeley. The hunt for antimatter began in earnest in 1932, with the discovery of the positron, a particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge. However, creating an antiproton would be far more difficult since it needs nearly 2,000 times the energy. In 1955, the most powerful "atom smasher" in the world, the Bevatron built at Berkeley could provide the required energy. Detection was accomplished with a maze of magnets and electronic counters through which only antiprotons could pass. After several hours of bombarding copper with protons accelerated to 6.2 billion electron volts of energy, the scientists counted a total of 60 antiprotons.*TIS
1955, a new atomic subparticle called a negative proton (antiproton) was discovered at U.C. Berkeley. The hunt for antimatter began in earnest in 1932, with the discovery of the positron, a particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge. However, creating an antiproton would be far more difficult since it needs nearly 2,000 times the energy. In 1955, the most powerful "atom smasher" in the world, the Bevatron built at Berkeley could provide the required energy. Detection was accomplished with a maze of magnets and electronic counters through which only antiprotons could pass. After several hours of bombarding copper with protons accelerated to 6.2 billion electron volts of energy, the scientists counted a total of 60 antiprotons.*TIS
1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is thought to be the first video game. It was a very simple tennis game, similar to the classic 1970s video game Pong, and it was quite a hit at a Brookhaven National Laboratory open house.
In 1948 he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory’s instrumentation group. He served as head of that group from 1951 to 1968.
During that time, in October Brookhaven held annual visitors’ days, during which thousands of people would come tour the lab. Higinbotham was responsible for creating an exhibit to show off the instrumentation division’s work.
Most of the existing exhibits were rather dull. Higinbotham thought he could better capture visitors’ interest by creating an interactive demonstration. He later recalled in a magazine interview that he had thought “it might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.”
Having worked on displays for radar systems and many other electronic devices, Higinbotham had no trouble designing the simple game display.
Higinbotham made some drawings, and blueprints were drawn up. Technician Robert Dvorak spent about two weeks building the device. After a little debugging, the first video game was ready for its debut. They called the game Tennis for Two.
Tennis for Two had none of the fancy graphics video games use today. The cathode ray tube display simply showed a side view of a tennis court represented by just two lines, one representing the ground and a one representing the net. The ball was just a dot that bounced back and forth. Players also had to keep score for themselves.
Visitors loved it. It quickly became the most popular exhibit, with people standing in long lines to get a chance to play.
The first version, used in the 1958 visitor’s day, had an oscilloscope with a tiny display, only five inches in diameter. The next year, Higinbotham improved it with a larger display screen. He also added another feature: the game could now simulate stronger or weaker gravity, so visitors could play tennis on the moon, Earth or Jupiter.
After two years, Tennis for Two was retired. The oscilloscope and computer were taken for other uses, and Higinbotham designed a new visitor’s day display that showed cosmic rays passing through a spark chamber.
Higinbotham, who had already patented 20 inventions, didn’t think his tennis game was particularly innovative. Although he saw that the Brookhaven visitors liked the game, he had no idea how popular video games would later become. ....The long line of people I though was not because this was so great but because all the rest of the things were so dull,” he once said. *BNL dot gov
1962, Dr. James D. Watson of the U.S., Dr. Francis Crick and Dr. Maurice Wilkins of Britain won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their work in determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).*TIS
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| *NobelPrize Org |
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| *Houston Chronicle |
1863 Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, FRS (October 18, 1863, Scotland - February 19, 1930, London) was a Scottish consulting electrical engineer. He was an earlier experimenter in cathode rays and after 1896 he was frequently called upon by the medical profession to take "Roentgen Pictures" of bones.
He described an electronic method of producing television in a June 18,1908 letter to Nature.
He gave a speech in London in 1911 where he described in great detail how distant electric vision could be achieved. This was to be done by using cathode ray tubes (CRTs) at both the transmitting and receiving ends. This was the first iteration of the electronic television which is still in use today. When Swinton gave his speech others had already been experimenting with the use of cathode ray tubes as a receiver, but the use of the technology as a transmitter was unheard of. *Wik
Indian-head test pattern used during the black-and-white era before 1970. It was displayed when a television station first signed on every day.(Raise your hand if you remember!)🙋
1902 (Ernst) Pascual Jordan (18 October 1902 in Hanover, German Empire; d. 31 July 1980 in Hamburg, Federal Republic of Germany) German physicist who in the late 1920s founded (with Max Born and later Werner Heisenberg) quantum mechanics using matrix methods, showing how light could be interpreted as composed of discrete quanta of energy. Later, (with Wolfgang Pauli and Eugene Wigner), while it was still in its early stages of development, he contributed to the quantum mechanics of electron-photon interactions, now called quantum electrodynamics. He also originated (concurrently with Robert Dicke) a theory of cosmology that proposed to make the universal constants of nature, (such as the universal gravitational constant G), variable over time. *TIS
1919 George Edward Pelham Box (18 October 1919, March 28, 2013, Madison, WI) is a statistician, who has made important contributions in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference.
Box has written research papers and published books. These include Statistics for experimenters (1978), Time series analysis: Forecasting and control (1979, with Gwilym Jenkins) and Bayesian inference in statistical analysis. (1973, with George C. Tiao). Today, his name is associated with important results in statistics such as Box–Jenkins models, Box–Cox transformations, Box–Behnken designs, and others. Box married Joan Fisher, the second of Ronald Fisher's five daughters. In 1978, Joan Fisher Box published a biography of Ronald Fisher, with substantial collaboration of Box. *Wik
In his obituary for Box, Brad Jones of JMP recounted the following, with another fascinating Box quote,
"The last time I saw him was at the JMP Discovery Summit conference in 2009 where I introduced him to give a speech. George got a standing ovation from a crowd of several hundred fans of design of experiments and particularly his work. I will never forget his remarks as the applause died slowly away.
He said, "I feel like the son of the sultan on his 21st birthday when presented with 21 virgins. I know what to do. I just don't know where to start!"
Box died on 28 March 2013. He was 93 years old
My favorite Box quote (slightly shortened from his actual comment) is
1930 Zygmunt Wilhelm "Z. W." Birnbaum (18 October 1903 – 15 December 2000), often known as Bill Birnbaum, was a Polish-American mathematician and statistician who contributed to functional analysis, nonparametric testing and estimation, probability inequalities, survival distributions, competing risks, and reliability theory.
After first earning a law degree and briefly practicing law, Birnbaum obtained his PhD in 1929 at the University of Lwów under the supervision of Hugo Steinhaus, and was associated with the Lwów School of Mathematics. He visited University of Göttingen, Germany from 1929 to 1931, first working as an assistant for Edmund Landau.
After studying insurance mathematics and earning a diploma in actuarial science with Felix Bernstein in Göttingen, he worked as an actuary in Vienna during 1931–1932, and was then transferred to Lwów where he continued working as an actuary. After obtaining a position as a correspondent for a Polish newspaper, he arrived in New York as a reporter in 1937. He became a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington in 1939 (with help from Harold Hotelling and letters of reference from Richard Courant, Albert Einstein, and Edmund Landau).
Birnbaum was actively involved in reliability work with Boeing through the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories during the late 1950s and 1960s, and was a key member of the "Seattle school of reliability", a group which also included Tom Bray, Gordon Crawford, James Esary, George Marsaglia, Al Marshall, Frank Proschan, Ron Pyke, and Sam Saunders.
Birnbaum served as Editor of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1967–1970) and as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1964). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 (spent at the Sorbonne, Paris), and a Fulbright Program Fellowship in 1964 (spent at the University of Rome). *Wik
1938 Phillip Griffiths (October 18, 1938, Raleigh, North Carolina - ) is an American mathematician, known for his work in the field of geometry, and in particular for the complex manifold approach to algebraic geometry. He was a major developer in particular of the theory of variation of Hodge structure in Hodge theory and moduli theory.*Wik
1945 Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE (born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.
Margaret Dusa Waddington was born in London, England, on 18 October 1945 to Edinburgh architect Margaret Justin Blanco White, second wife of biologist Conrad Hal Waddington, her father.Her sister is the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, and she has an elder half-brother C. Jake Waddington by her father's first marriage. Her mother was the daughter of Amber Reeves, the noted feminist, author and lover of H. G. Wells. McDuff grew up in Scotland where her father was Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. McDuff was educated at St George's School for Girls in Edinburgh and, although the standard was lower than at the corresponding boys' school, The Edinburgh Academy, McDuff had an exceptionally good mathematics teacher.She writes:
"I always wanted to be a mathematician (apart from a time when I was eleven when I wanted to be a farmer's wife), and assumed that I would have a career, but I had no idea how to go about it: I didn't realize that the choices which one made about education were important and I had no idea that I might experience real difficulties and conflicts in reconciling the demands of a career with life as a woman."
Turning down a scholarship to the University of Cambridge to stay with her boyfriend in Scotland, she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. She graduated with a BSc Hons in 1967, going on to Girton College, Cambridge as a doctoral student. Here, under the guidance of mathematician George A. Reid, McDuff worked on problems in functional analysis. She solved a problem on Von Neumann algebras, constructing infinitely many different factors of type II1, and published the work in the Annals of Mathematics.
After completing her doctorate in 1971 McDuff was appointed to a two-year Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cambridge. Following her husband, the literary translator David McDuff, she left for a six-month visit to Moscow. Her husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky. Though McDuff had no specific plans it turned out to be a profitable visit for her mathematically. There, she met Israel Gelfand in Moscow who gave her a deeper appreciation of mathematics. McDuff later wrote:
[My collaboration with him]... "was not planned: it happened that his was the only name which came to mind when I had to fill out a form in the Inotdel office. The first thing that Gel'fand told me was that he was much more interested in the fact that my husband was studying the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky than that I had found infinitely many type II-sub-one factors, but then he proceeded to open my eyes to the world of mathematics. It was a wonderful education, in which reading Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri played as important a role as learning about Lie groups or reading Cartan and Eilenberg. Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which he could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!"
On returning to Cambridge McDuff started attending Frank Adams's topology lectures and was soon invited to teach at the University of York. In 1975 she separated from her husband, and was divorced in 1978.[6][10] At the University of York, she "essentially wrote a second PhD"[9] while working with Graeme Segal. At this time a position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) opened up for her, reserved for visiting female mathematicians. Her career as a mathematician developed further while at MIT, and soon she was accepted to the Institute for Advanced Study where she worked with Segal on the Atiyah–Segal completion theorem. She then returned to England, where she took up a lectureship at the University of Warwick.[
Around this time she met mathematician John Milnor who was then based in Princeton University. To live closer to him she took up an untenured assistant professorship at the Stony Brook University. Now an independent mathematician, she began work on the relationship between diffeomorphisms and the classifying space for foliations. She has since worked on symplectic topology. In the spring of 1985, McDuff attended the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris to study Mikhael Gromov's work on elliptic methods. Since 2007, she has held the Helen Lyttle Kimmel chair at Barnard College.
In 1984 McDuff married Milnor, now a professor at Stony Brook University, and a Fields medallist, Wolf Prize winner and Abel Prize Laureate.
For the past 30 years McDuff has been a contributor to the development of the field of symplectic geometry and topology. She gave the first example of symplectic forms on a closed manifold that are cohomologous but not diffeomorphic and also classified the rational and ruled symplectic four-manifolds, completed with François Lalonde. More recently, partly in collaboration with Susan Tolman, she has studied applications of methods of symplectic topology to the theory of Hamiltonian torus actions. She has also worked on embedding capacities of 4-dimensional symplectic ellipsoids with Felix Schlenk, which gives rise to some very interesting number-theoretical questions. It also indicates a connection between the combinatorics of J-holomorphic curves in the blow up of the projective plane and the numbers that appear as indices in embedded contact homology. With Katrin Wehrheim, she has challenged the foundational rigor of a classic proof in symplectic geometry.
With Dietmar Salamon, she co-authored two textbooks Introduction to Symplectic Topology and J-Holomorphic Curves and Symplectic Topology
1793 John Wilson (6 Aug 1741 in Applethwaite, Westmoreland, England - 18 Oct 1793 in Kendal, Westmoreland, England) In 1764 Wilson was elected a Fellow of Peterhouse and he taught mathematics at Cambridge with great skill, quickly gaining an outstanding reputation for himself. However, he was not to continue in the world of university teaching, for in 1766 he was called to the bar having begun a legal career on 22 January 1763 when he was admitted to the Middle Temple. It was a highly successful career, too.
He is best known among mathematicians for Wilson's theorem which states that
... if p is prime then 1 + (p - 1)! is divisible by p
This result was first published by Waring, without proof, and attributed to Wilson. Leibniz appears to have known the result. It was first proved by Lagrange in 1773 who showed that the converse is true, namely
... if n divides 1 + (n - 1)! then n is prime.
Almost certainly Wilson's theorem was a guess made by him, based on the evidence of a number of special cases, which neither he nor Waring knew how to prove. *SAU
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1845 Jean-Dominique Comte de Cassini (30 June 1748 in Paris, France - 18 Oct 1845 in Thury, France) French mathematician and surveyor who worked on his father's map of France. He was the son of César-François Cassini de Thury and was born at the Paris Observatory. In 1784 he succeeded his father as director of the observatory; but his plans for its restoration and re-equipment were wrecked in 1793 by the animosity of the National Assembly. His position having become intolerable, he resigned on September 6, and was thrown into prison in 1794, but released after seven months. He then withdrew to Thury, where he died fifty-one years later.
He published in 1770 an account of a voyage to America in 1768, undertaken as the commissary of the French Academy of Sciences with a view to testing Pierre Le Roy’s watches at sea. A memoir in which he described the operations superintended by him in 1787 for connecting the observatories of Paris and Greenwich by longitude-determinations appeared in 1791. He visited England for the purposes of the work, and saw William Herschel at Slough. He completed his father’s map of France, which was published by the Academy of Sciences in 1793. It served as the basis for the Atlas National (1791), showing France in departments.
Cassini’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’observatoire de Paris (1810) embodied portions of an extensive work, the prospectus of which he had submitted to the Academy of Sciences in 1774. The volume included his Eloges of several academicians, and the autobiography of his great-grandfather, Giovanni Cassini.*Wik
1871 Charles Babbage,(26 Dec 1792-18 Oct 1871) computer pioneer. His obsession for mechanizing computation made him into an embittered and crotchety old man. He especially hated street musicians, whose activities, he figured, ruined a quarter of his working potential. *VFR English mathematician and pioneer of mechanical computation, which he pursued to eliminate inaccuracies in mathematical tables. By 1822, he had a small calculating machine able to compute squares. He produced prototypes of portions of a larger Difference Engine. (Georg and Edvard Schuetz later constructed the first working devices to the same design which were successful in limited applications.) In 1833 he began his programmable Analytical Machine, a forerunner of modern computers. His other inventions include the cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking. *TIS
A portion of the difference engine
1917 Ruth Gentry (February 22, 1862 – October 18, 1917) was a pioneering American woman mathematician during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. She was the first Indiana-born woman to acquire a PhD degree in mathematics, and most likely the first woman born in Indiana to receive a doctoral degree in any scientific discipline.
Ruth Ellen Gentry was the youngest of three children born to Jeremiah Gentry (1827–1906) and Lucretia (Wilcox) Gentry (1830–1909). Jeremiah was a farmer and stock trader who moved to Hendricks County, Indiana from Bullitt County, Kentucky, when he was five years old, and remained there the rest of his life. Ruth and her siblings, Oliver (1853–1878) and Mary Frances (1860–1929), were born and grew up on the family farm near Stilesville, Indiana. Ruth's early education took place there as well.
Gentry attended Indiana State Normal School, a teachers' college that had opened in 1870 but did not yet award bachelor's degrees. After graduating in 1880, she taught at preparatory schools for ten years. In 1885, she decided to get her bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan—at that time one the few American colleges to admit women as undergraduates. She studied mathematics for a year and then went back to teaching school, moving to Florida for the years 1886–88 to teach at DeLand Academy and College (which changed its name while she was there to DeLand University).
Gentry did her graduate work starting in 1890 at Bryn Mawr College, which at that time was one of the only institutions of higher education in the country to admit women for graduate studies. In 1891 she was a Fellow in Mathematics at Bryn Mawr. Following her first year, she was awarded the Association of College Alumnae European Fellowship, becoming the first mathematician and second recipient of the honor.[3] She used the fellowship to study in Europe in 1891–92. Gentry went first to Germany in the hope of being allowed to sit in on lectures by German mathematicians at one of the country's universities (which at the time did not admit women). After she had been turned down by numerous professors, Lazarus Fuchs of the University of Berlin secured permission for her to attend lectures by himself and Ludwig Schlesinger. This arrangement lasted only one semester before being revoked by university administrators. She remained in Europe for an additional semester, attending lectures in mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Upon her return to Bryn Mawr, Gentry was appointed a fellow in mathematics for 1892–93, after which she stayed on another year as a fellow by courtesy of the school. She became Charlotte Scott's first graduate student, and in 1894 she finished her doctoral work at Bryn Mawr. Her thesis, On the Forms of Plane Quartic Curves, was not published until 1896, which is why she is sometimes described as one of Scott's first two students, along with Isabel Maddison.
After earning her PhD, Gentry taught at Vassar College, becoming the first person on the mathematics faculty at Vassar to hold a doctoral degree. In 1900 she was made associate professor.
Two years later, suffering from health issues, Gentry left Vassar to become the associate principal and head of the mathematics department at Miss Gleim's, a private school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1905 she left this position and became a volunteer nurse. She traveled in the United States and Europe for a time, but suffered from further health problems. Her illness progressed until she died of breast cancer in Indianapolis, Indiana at the age of 55 on October 18, 1917. She is buried in Stilesville Cemetery in Stilesville, Indiana.
Gentry's main interest was in geometry, especially the study of quartic curves, which was the content of her thesis.
1931 Thomas Alva Edison (11 Feb 1847-18 Oct 1931) Inventor, died in West Orange, NJ. He invented the first phonograph (1877) and the prototype of the practical incandescent electric light bulb (1879). His many inventions led to his being internationally known as "the wizard of Menlo Park", from the name of his first laboratory. By the late 1880s he was contributing to the development of motion pictures. By 1912 he was experimenting with talking pictures. His many inventions include a storage battery, a Dictaphone, and a mimeograph. Meanwhile, he had become interested in the development of a system for widespread distribution of electric power from central generating stations. He held over 1,000 patents.In 1962 his second laboratory and home in West Orange, NJ, would be designated a National Historic Site.*TIS
1974 Charles Ernest Weatherburn (18 June 1884 – 18 October 1974) was an Australian-born mathematician.
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
Weatherburn graduated from the University of Sydney an MA in 1906. After being awarded a scholarship he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge sitting the Mathematical Tripos examinations in 1908. Weatherburn was awarded a First Class degree. On his return to Australia, Weatherburn taught at Ormond College of the University of Melbourne.
In 1923 was appointed chair of mathematics in Canterbury College, University of New Zealand. He returned to Australia in 1929 as chair of mathematics at the University of Western Australia, a post he held until he retired in 1950.
He died in Perth, Western Australia in 1974.
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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