This is not a math blog, except that it has to do with logic, or the lack thereof, but I teach kids, and this is a story my bright kids need to read.....and thanks to JD2718 in New York for passing this along.
Just before the recent storm hit Haiti, Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote this blog about the Creole Pigs that were once literally everywhere in Haiti, and how they came NOT to be there. It is a story of the worst indifference to sustainable development, and needs to be shared. ... This is me sharing. Since Blogs come and go, I am copying the whole thing below, but I do encourage you to read the original: =================================================================================== Growing up in the United States, I grew up listening to my Haitian father speak longingly of two things that he said we couldn't get quite right in the US. The first were mangoes. Most of the mangoes that are found in the US are vaguely round like a Nerf football, and have a mostly deep reddish hue when ripe. They are beautiful, but to hear my father speak, are to the mango what the Red Delicious is to the apple: overproduced and vaguely generic.
The mango of his childhood, the Madame Francis mango, is flatter and green - like an overgrown lima bean. Even at its ripest it only hints at a dusky yellow color. It is also unique to Haiti. I've had it, and he's right; it is delicious; a queen among mangoes.
My father's other long lost food craving, pork from the Creole Pig, was also unique to Haiti. Unlike the pink pig encapsulated in the image of Wilbur, the pig from Charlotte's web, the Creole Pig was not pink. It, like the population of Haiti, was black and thus unlike American pigs did not sunburn. Raised by eighty to 85% of rural households, the relatively small but dense Creole pig subsisted not on grain, but on the detritus of the island's human population. It could thrive on the husk of rice, the cob of corn. In a nation without consolidated trash pickup the Creole pig acted as the nation's garbage men playing a key role in maintaining the fertility of the soil. And, because it was not dependent on feed for its survival, it functioned for the peasant population as a sort of mobile, literal piggy bank - the animals were sold or slaughtered to pay for school, for marriages, for unexpected medical expenses.
All of this is spoken in the past tense because between the 1970s and the 1980s the Creole pigs were systematically eradicated under pressure of the US government.
Like most of development history some of the facts are in contention, but this much is certain. In the 1970's the African Swine River Virus had spread from Spain to the Dominican Republic and then to Haiti by virtue of the Artibonite River which straddles the two countries.
Now comes the contentious part.
By 1982, says the United States government almost 1/3rd of Haiti's pig population was infected. A lot of Haitians (and many independent organizations) argue otherwise. What is not in contention is that the US, in fear of the virus spreading to its own pig population, pressured Haiti's government to seize all of the pigs and kill them.
Everyone who had pigs seized were supposed to be compensated in the form of replacement pigs - fat, pink pigs from the American Midwest, deemed 'better' by the USDA. These pigs needed clean drinking water (which 80% of Haitians did not have access to), 90 dollars a year in feed (in a nation where per capita income was 130 dollars a year), vaccination, and special roofed pens to serve as protection from the harsh Caribbean sun.
Does anyone see a problem with this?
Never mind the fact that many Haitians who had their pigs seized were never actually compensated (more on that in a second) - they couldn't have afforded the compensation anyway. In fact, many of those who received pigs found that their new pigs rapidly died.
So much for 'better'.
The eradication of the Creole pig only served to further impoverish Haitians. It forced many children to quit school, forced small farmers to mortgage and eventually lose their land, and forced many Haitians to cut down trees, rapidly increasing the Island's rate of deforestation, to create cash income from charcoal. All simply to save an already rich country from the small risk (and by most independent accounts the number of pigs infected in Haiti was much smaller than the 33% cited by the US) posed to it by a poor, tiny island nation.
It was, however, a boon to US pig farmers who generated millions in revenue according to grassroots international offloading these ill suited pigs on poor Haitian peasants. How?
In order to get a replacement pig, Haitians were required to pay a princely sum of $50 dollars per pig.
Frustra fit per plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora.
It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.
~William of Ockham
The 99th day of the year, If 99 divides some 4-digit number ABCD, then 99 also divides BCDA, CDAB, and DABC, every cyclic permutation of the number.
There are 9 ways to express 99 as p + 2q, where p and q are prime. (Students might wonder why this strange p+2q idea should be interesting. It is related to a conjecture of Emile Lemoine in 1890.
The conjecture states that any odd number greater than 5 can be written as p+2q where p and q are primes. Students might try to find the several numbers smaller than 99 that can be expressed in p+2q form over 10 ways.)
99 is the largest number that is equal to the sum of its digits plus the product of its digits: 99 = 9 + 9 + 9 * 9
and 99 is the alphanumeric value of THIRTEEN *Number Gossip
992 = 9801 and 98 + 01 = 99 so it is a Kaprekar number, named after D. R. Kaprekar, an Indian recreational mathematician.
And Jim Wilder adds that 99 is the sum of three squares, and also of three cubes. 99 = 3^2 + 3^2 + 9^2 = 2^3 + 3^3 + 4^3. I would add, in keeping with the theme of threes, that it is the sum of three primes, 89 + 7 + 3,
and David Marain @dmarain recently reminded me 1/992 = 0.000102030405060708091011121314151617181920212223242526272... The question for students, It must be a repeating decimal, when does it start to repeat?
(and there was something about bottles of beer on the wall, but they don't seem to be there anymore. Maybe someone took them down...)
EVENTS
1585 The Tiger (loaned to Ralegh by Queen Elizabeth) left the Portsmouth harbor bound for "the Virginias" carrying the settlers for the colony of Roanoke Island. Onboard for his second trip to the area was Thomas Harriot, the first known scientist in North America, and the first European to speak and record an indigenous language of the North American continent, a Carolina Algonquin dialect. *Robyn Arianrnod (Thomas Harriot, A Life in Science) More about Harriot and the Roanoke colony (or lost colony) here.
The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time. He is sometimes credited with the introduction of the potato to the British Isles. Harriot invented binary notation and arithmetic several decades before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but this remained unknown until the 1920's. He was also the first person to make a drawing of the Moon through a telescope, on 5 August 1609, about four months before Galileo Galilei.
1626 English philosopher, Francis Bacon, died a month after performing his first scientific experiment. He stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this would cause it to spoil less rapidly. The chill he caught during this experiment led to his death. [A. Hellemans and B. Bunch. The Timetables of Science, p . 32]. *VFR
1673 Leibniz elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London, a position of which he was very desirous. [The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 9, p. 583]. *VFR 1752 A letter from James Short is read to the Royal Society to inform them of a paper by Euler on "Correcting the Aberrations in the Object-Glasses of Refracting Telescopes." *Phil Trans. 1753 48:287-296 1790 John Dalton wrote to his cousin George Bewley asking for advice on his career and describing a physiological experiment on himself. *ScienceMuseumArchive @GalileosBalls
Dalton expresses his desire to “quit his present profession as teacher and enter upon some other…”. He asks his cousin’s advice about his plans: “I wish to enter upon the study of physics and science”. In the same letter, he describes his experiment on himself “to determine a near as might be the quantity of matter discharged from the body by insensible perspiration …evacuations solid, liquid, perspiration…” – so that from this we are even given an idea about what he ate and drank : loaf bread, cheese, oat bread, meal, meat, potatoes; beer, boiled milk and tea."
1810 Laplace announced his central limit theorem. Nowhere in his work did Laplace state a general theorem which would have corresponded to the CLT in today’s sense. He only treated particular problems concerning the approximation of probabilities of sums or linear combinations of a great number of random variables.
In probability theory, the central limit theorem (CLT) states that, under appropriate conditions, the distribution of a normalized version of the sample mean converges to a standard normal distribution. This holds even if the original variables themselves are not normally distributed. There are several versions of the CLT, each applying in the context of different conditions.
The theorem is a key concept in probability theory because it implies that probabilistic and statistical methods that work for normal distributions can be applicable to many problems involving other types of distributions.
This theorem has seen many changes during the formal development of probability theory. Previous versions of the theorem date back to 1811, but in its modern form it was only precisely stated as late as 1920.
*Wik
In 1895, a spectrogram made by American astronomer James Keeler proved that the rings of Saturn were indeed composed of meteoric particles, as predicted by James Maxwell. If the rings were solid, observations would show uniform rotation. However, Keeler's spectrogram of light reflected from Saturn's rings showed a Doppler shift indicating a variation in radial velocity. Thus, particles in the inner part of a ring, closer to Saturn, move at a different rotational speed from those in more distance parts of a ring, as predicted by Kepler's 3rd law. Keeler published A Spectroscopic Proof of the Meteoric Constitution of Saturn's Rings in the May 1895 issue of Astrophysical Journal, vol. 1, p.416, the journal he co-founded with George E. Hale.*TIS
Keeler was the first to observe the gap in Saturn's rings now known as the Encke Gap, using the 36-inch refractor at Lick Observatory on 7 January 1888. After this feature had been named for Johann Encke, who had observed a much broader variation in the brightness of the A Ring, Keeler's contributions were brought to light. The second major gap in the A Ring, discovered by Voyager, was named the Keeler Gap in his honor.*Wik
1921 New York Times carries article of St. Paul, Mn professor who claims relativity was invented in 1866 by someone calling themselves "Kinertia".
HT to Ash Jogalekar@curiouswavefn 1940 The German Army crossed the border and invaded Denmark. In response, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the Nobel Prizes using the original gold. *Wik
In 1922, de Hevesy co-discovered (with Dirk Coster) the element hafnium (72Hf) (Latin Hafnia for "Copenhagen", the home town of Niels Bohr... he had met Bohr in England in 1918 and settled in Copenhagen in 1920).
While in Stockholm in 1943, de Hevesy received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was later inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and received the Copley Medal. His Nobel Prize was presented for his pioneering work in the use of isotopic indicators both in inorganic and life sciences .
1959 Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright died on this day in 1959. He was posthumously recognized as "the greatest American architect of all time" by the AIA *Shaun Usher @LettersOfNote In 1959, NASA announced the selection of America's first seven astronauts for project Mercury. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald Slayton were chosen from 110 applicants. Their training program at Langley, which ranged from a graduate-level course in introductory space science to simulator training and scuba-diving. Project Mercury, NASA's first high profile program, was an effort to learn if humans could survive in space. NASA required astronaut candidates to be male, not older than 40 years of age, not more than 5' 11" height and in excellent physical condition. On 5 May 1961, Shepard became the first American in space. *TIS
In 1981, Nature published the longest scientific name in history. With 16,569 nucleotides, the systematic name for human mitochondrial DNA is 207,000 letters long. *TIS
BIRTHS
1650 Jean Le Fevre, born in 1650 (*SAU gives 1652 for D.O.B.) in Lisieux and died in 1706 in Paris ,was a French astronomer. Worker weaver until the age of thirty years, Jean Le Fevre was an autodidact who acquired, during his leisure hours, great knowledge in mathematics and astronomy. He calculated several eclipses with great accuracy and accomplished excellent observations using instruments that had been provided. Le Fevre advised Picard through Philippe de La Hire. Le Fevre has successfully computed a table of the passage of the Moon from the meridian completed in 1680 in Paris where he was given a pension of the Academy of Sciences. Then he delivered the famous astronomical tables correctly represent the solar and lunar eclipses and continued writing the Knowledge of time. He knew better than calculating eclipses La Hire with whom he worked on a number of projects until he accused it of stealing astronomical tables that were published. *French Wikipedia.
1770 Thomas Johann Seebeck (9 Apr 1770; 10 Dec 1831 at age 61) German physicist who discovered (1821) that an electric current flows between different conductive materials that are kept at different temperatures, known as the Seebeck effect. It is the basis of the thermocouple and is considered the most accurate measurement of temperature. It is also a key component of the semi-conductor, the foundation of the modern computer business. Seebeck's work was the basis of German physicist Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854) discoveries in electricity and of French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier (1785-1845), whose Peltier effect became well known as a way to use electricity to freeze water (air conditioning, refrigeration). *TIS
1791 George Peacock (9 Apr 1791; 8 Nov 1858 at age 67) English mathematician who, with fellow Cambridge undergraduates Charles Babbage and John Herschel brought reform to nomenclature in English mathematics. They formed the Analytical Society (1815) whose aims were to bring the advanced methods of calculus from Europe to Cambridge to replace the increasingly stagnant notation of Isaac Newton from the previous century. The Society produced a translation of a book of Lacroix in the differential and integral calculus. In 1830, he published Treatise on Algebra which attempted to give algebra a logical treatment, and which went at least partway toward the establishment of symbolic algebra. Instead of using only numbers he used objects, and showed the associativity and commutativity of these objects. reformed British Algebra, Dean of Ely Cathedral. *TIS
1806 The great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born. In 1822, young Isambard began work in his father’s cramped little office in the City. The older Brunel, who had designed machines for making army boots and, significantly, a tunneling shield which made underwater tunneling possible, was involved in projects ranging from suspension bridges and dock installations to a projected canal in Panama. Three years later he began his greatest undertaking, the construction of the first tunnel under the Thames, from Rotherhithe to Wapping. His son hurled himself into it with the superhuman energy and resourcefulness that would mark his whole adult life. He was lucky to survive the desperate moment in 1828 when the river broke into the tunnel and a massive wave swept along it. Six of the workforce were killed and young Isambard was badly hurt and took months to recover. He went on to start a brilliantly successful separate career of his own and to create the Great Western Railway and the first transatlantic steamships. His father, knighted in 1841, died in 1849 at the age of eighty. The even more famous son lived on for only another ten years, to die at fifty-three in 1859. *History Today @HistoryToday
1813 Robert R Anstice (9 April 1813 in Madeley, Shropshire, England - 17 Dec 1853 in Wigginton (near Tring), Hertfordshire, England) During his time as vicor at Wigginton, Anstice became interested in the mathematical work of another rector, Kirkman, who had written on the subject of Steiner triple systems (as they are now called). In one of his papers Kirkman gave an elegant construction of a resolvable Steiner triple system on 15 elements (the famous Kirkman 15 schoolgirls problem), making use of what are now known as a Room square of order 8 and the Fano plane. Kirkman stated that the generalisation of this construction seemed very hard. *SAU
1816 Charles-Eugène Delaunay (9 Apr 1816; 5 Aug 1872 at age 56) French mathematician and astronomer whose theory of lunar motion advanced the development of planetary-motion theories. After 20 years of work, he published two volumes on lunar theory, La Théorie du mouvement de la lune (1860,1867). This is an important case of the three body problem. Delaunay found the longitude, latitude and parallax of the Moon as infinite series. These gave results correct to 1 second of arc but were not too practical as the series converged slowly. However this work was important in the beginnings of functional analysis. Delaunay succeeded Le Verrier as director of the Paris Observatory in 1870 but two years later he and three companions drowned in a boating accident. *TIS
1830 Eadweard Muybridge (9 Apr 1830; died 8 May 1904 at age 74) English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. For his work on human and animal motion, he invented a superfast shutter. Leland Stanford, former governor of California, hired Muybridge to settle a hotly debated issue: Is there a moment in a horse’s gait when all four hooves are off the ground at once? In 1972, Muybridge took up the challenge. In 1878, he succeeded in taking a sequence of photographs with 12 cameras that captured the moment when the animal’s hooves were tucked under its belly. Publication of these photographs made Muybridge an international celebrity. Another noteworthy event in his life was that he was tried (but acquitted) for the murder of his wife's lover. *TIS
Galloping horse, animated using photos by Muybridge (1887)
1834 Edmond N. Laguerre (9 April 1834 in Bar-le-Duc, France - 14 Aug 1886 in Bar-le-Duc, France)studied approximation methods and is best remembered for the special functions: the Laguerre polynomials.*SAU 1865 Charles Proteus Steinmetz (9 Apr 1865; 26 Oct 1923 at age 58) German-American electrical engineer and inventor whose theories and mathematical analysis of alternating current systems helped establish them as the preferred form of electrical energy in the United States, and throughout the world. In 1893, Steinmetz joined the newly organized General Electric Company where he was an engineer then consultant until his death. His early research on hysteresis (loss of power due to magnetic resistance) led him to study alternating current, which could eliminate hysteresis loss in motors. He did extensive new work on the theory of a.c. for electrical engineers to use. His last research was on lightning, and its threat to the new AC power lines. He was responsible for the expansion of the electric power industry in the U.S. In 1888 he was about to receive his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Breslau but fled the country to avoid arrest as a socialist. This hunchback with a high squeaky voice published several papers in mathematics, but earned his living as an electrical engineer. [A Century of American Mathematics, Part 1, p. 14]. *VFR.. His theories and mathematical analysis of alternating current systems helped establish them as the preferred form of electrical energy in the United States, and throughout the world.
Group tour of the Marconi Wireless Station in Somerset, New Jersey in 1921, including Steinmetz (center) and Albert Einstein (to his right)
1869 Élie-Joseph Cartan (9 Apr 1869; 6 May 1951 at age 82) French mathematician who greatly developed the theory of Lie groups and contributed to the theory of subalgebras. By 1904 Cartan was turning to papers on differential equations and from 1916 on he published mainly on differential geometry. Cartan also published work on relativity and the theory of spinors. He is certainly one of the most important mathematicians of the first half of the 20th century. *TIS
1878 Marcel Grossmann (9 April 1878 in Budapest, Hungary Died: 7 Sept 1936 in Zürich, Switzerland) was a classmate of Albert Einstein. When Einstein sought to formulate his ideas on general relativity mathematically, he turned to Grossmann for assistance. *VFR 1894 Cypra Cecilia Krieger Dunaj ( 9 April 1894. Jasło, Galicia, Austrian Empire{Poland}, 17 August 1974. Ontario, Canada) was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from a Canadian university and only the third person to be awarded a mathematics doctorate in Canada. She is best known for her English translation of Sierpinski's Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952).
Her doctoral dissertation was On the summability of trigonometric series with localized properties - on Fourier constants and convergence factors of double Fourier series. It was published in two parts, the first, On the summability of trigonometric series with localized properties, in 1928 and the second, On Fourier constants and convergence factors of double Fourier series, in 1930, both in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada.
Despite her credentials and experience, Krieger spent over a decade as a lecturer before being promoted to assistant professor in 1941. She taught courses in the Mathematics and Engineering departments - an average of 13 classes a week, some with as many as 75 students in each class. With such a demanding teaching schedule there was little time for research, yet she persevered, working on her own projects in the evenings.
Krieger is best known for her English translation of Sierpinski's Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952). In this latter book she presented a 30 page appendix on the theory of infinite cardinals and ordinals.
I should also mention her work for the Canadian Association of University Women. She strongly supported women having the chance to succeed in mathematics.
The Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship mentioned above was set up by the Canadian Mathematical Society in 1995. The reasons why the Society decided to name the prize for Krieger is described by Laura Turner
"... in an effort "to attach an appropriate name to this prestigious award" the decision was made to solicit input from Canadian Mathematical Society members as well, with each submitted name to be accompanied by an explanation of why it was suitable. It is not clear just how many submissions were received by either the Executive Committee or the ad hoc committee charged with the task of gathering information, receiving suggestions, and making recommendations for names to the Canadian Mathematical Society Board, but the decision was understood as nontrivial. According to the report of the ad hoc committee, at least three possible names were proposed for the lectureship. The Executive of the Canadian Mathematical Society, having considered the possibilities, proposed in December of 1994: "That the Prize for Outstanding Research by Women in Mathematics be named the Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship, pending consultation with the families." The motion was carried unanimously."
1900 Hendrik Douwe Kloosterman (9 April 1900 in Rottevalle, The Netherlands - 1968 in Leiden, The Netherlands) The group he studied was the special linear group of 2 by 2 matrices over the ring of integers modulo pn. Schur had solved the problem for the case n = 1, where the matrices are over a prime field, and the case of n = 2 had been solved in the 1930s. Kloosterman solved the general case in two papers The behaviour of general theta functions under the modular group and the characters of binary modular congruence groups which occupy 130 pages of the Annals of Mathematics in 1946. *SAU
1919 John Presper Eckert (9 Apr 1919; died 3 Jun 1995 at age 76) American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the first commercial computer company (the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay line memory. *Wik Thanks to Arjen Dijksman)
1921 Mary Jackson (née Winston; April 9, 1921 – February 11, 2005) was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA's first black female engineer.
After 34 years at NASA, Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available. She realized she could not earn further promotions without becoming a supervisor. She accepted a demotion to become a manager of both the Federal Women's Program, in the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity Programs and of the Affirmative Action Program. In this role, she worked to influence the hiring and promotion of women in NASA's science, engineering, and mathematics careers.
Jackson's story features in the 2016 non-fiction book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. She is one of the three protagonists in Hidden Figures, the film adaptation released the same year.
In 2019, Jackson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.In 2021, the Washington, D.C. headquarters of NASA was renamed the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters.
1928 Tom Lehrer, ( born Apr. 9, 1928, ) is an American mathematician turned song-writer. Lehrer studied mathematics at Harvard, but in the 1950s he began performing satirical songs that he had written, accompanying himself on the piano.
In 1953, he released his first album, Songs of Tom Lehrer, which he sold from his home by mail. His tunes embraced such warm topics as dope-peddling, southern conservatism, and obsession with the dead, and consequently, his songs were seldom played on the radio. His reputation was therefore slow to spread, but spread it did, and by 1959, when he released his second album, he was moderately well-known, at least on college campuses. His appeal to his audiences lay mostly in the cleverness of his song-writing, his deft piano playing, and his nimble tongue; his appeal to us lies in all this plus the fact that many of his subjects were scientific. His song "Elements", from his second album in 1959, is nothing but a list of the 102 then-known chemical elements, sung to the tune of the “Major General” song from Pirates of Penzance, but it is just brilliant. You can see him perform it on this YouTube video, a recording of a performance he gave in Copenhagen 1967, one of the few times he was recorded on film.
Other songs with a scientific theme are "Lobachevski”, which is not so much about the mathematician as it is about plagiarism, and "Who's Next", about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Considering that most of these songs were written over 60 years ago, they have a remarkable timeliness still today. Even "Vatican Rag," Lehrer's modest contribution to the reform of the Catholic liturgy, is just as funny today as it was during the days of Vatican II.
Perhaps Lehrer's most barbed satiric piece is "Werner von Braun," which took serious issue with scientists who lack social responsibility, whose "allegiance is ruled by expedience." "Once ze rockets go up, who cares where zay come down. That's not my department, says Werner von Braun."
Lehrer ceased public appearances in 1974 and has turned down, with only several exceptions, all requests to reprise his performances of the 1960s. He is reputed to have said that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger in 1973 made political satire obsolete. He seems to have been quite happy teaching mathematics at UC-Santa Cruz until his retirement. *LH
But for Math Teachers who have lived through 40+ years of Math Wars as student and teacher, their is only NEW Math.
1931 Heisuke Hironaka (9 Apr 1931, ) Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970 for his work in algebraic geometry giving a number of technical results, including the resolution of certain singularities and torus imbeddings with implications in the theory of analytic functions, and complex and Kähler manifolds. In simple terms, an algebraic variety is the set of all the solutions of a system of polynomial equations in some number of variables. Nonsingular varieties would be those that may not cross themselves. The problem is whether any variety is equivalent to one that is nonsingular. Oscar Zariski had shown earlier that this was true for varieties with dimension up to three. Hironaka showed that it is true for other dimensions.
As visiting professor at Seoul National University in 2008–2009, Hironaka mentored undergraduate student June Huh, a former high school drop-out and aspiring poet, encouraging his interest in pursuing math for graduate school. Huh won a fields medal in 2022 for the linkages he found between algebraic geometry and combinatorics.
His daughter, Eriko, is also a mathematician.
DEATHS
1348 William of Ockham (about 1288 in Ockham (near Ripley, Surrey), England - 9 April 1348 in Munich, Bavaria (now Germany))was an English Philosopher of the Early 14th Century. He is most remembered today for the quotation "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem . The direct translation is close to "Entities ought not to be multiplied except from necessity." Occam's razor has become a scientific rule of thumb for deciding between two theories to explain a single phenomenon. Given two otherwise equal theories, the more simple one is the better.*SAU The modern spelling is Ockham, and the remains of the estate is located off the M25 in London near Woking. All Saints Church, which dates to the 13th century, contains a modern stained-glass window of William of Occham. There is also a statue. Behind the church is a gate into the grounds of Ockham Park, but it is private land. It may be of interest to students of mathematics and computer science that Ada Lovelace's husband, also named William, was the Baron of Ockham in the 19th century.
Ockham is a rural and semi-rural village in the borough of Guildford in Surrey, England.
William of Ockham depicted on a stained glass window at All Saints' Church, Ockham.
1564 Georg Hartmann (sometimes spelled Hartman; February 9, 1489 – April 9, 1564) was a German engineer, instrument maker, author, printer, humanist, churchman, and astronomer. After finishing his studies, he travelled through Italy and finally settled in Nuremberg in 1518. There he constructed astrolabes, globes, sundials, and quadrants. In addition to these traditional scientific instruments Hartmann also made gunner's levels and sights. Hartmann was possibly the first to discover the inclination of Earth's magnetic field. He died in Nuremberg. His two published works were Perspectiva Communis (Nuremberg, 1542), a reprint of John Peckham's 1292 book on optics and Directorium (Nuremberg, 1554), a book on astrology. He also left Collectanea mathematica praeprimis gnomonicam spectania, 151 f. MS Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Quarto, Saec. 16 (1527–1528), an unpublished work on sundials and astrolabes that was translated by John Lamprey and published under the title of Hartmann's Practika in 2002. *Wik
One of four extant brass astrolabes manufactured by Hartmann and his artisans in 1537, and John Peckham's Perspectiva Communis by /science Photo Library
1626 Francis Bacon (22 Jan 1561, 9 Apr 1626 at age 65)English philosopher remembered for his influence promoting a scientific method. He held that the aim of scientific investigation is practical application of the understanding of nature to improve man's condition. He wrote that scientists should concentrate on certain important kinds of experimentally reproducible situations, (which he called "prerogative instances"). After tabulating such phenomena, the investigator should also aim to make a gradual ascent to more and more comprehensive laws, and will acquire greater and greater certainty as he or she moves up the pyramid of laws. At the same time each law that is reached should lead him to new kinds of experiment, that is, to kinds of experiment over and above those that led to the discovery of the law. *TIS
1643 Benedetto Castelli (1578 – April 9, 1643), born Antonio Castelli, was an Italian mathematician. Benedetto was his name in religion on entering the Benedictine Order. Born in Brescia (Tartaglia's home town also), he studied at the University of Padua and later became an abbot at the Benedictine monastery in Monte Cassino. He was a long-time friend and supporter of his teacher, Galileo Galilei, and in turn teacher to Galileo's son. He assisted Galileo's study of sunspots and participated in the examination of the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. On 5 December 1610 Castelli wrote to Galileo
If the position of Copernicus, that Venus revolves around the sun, is true (as I believe), it is clear that it would necessarily sometimes be seen by us horned and sometimes not, even though the planet maintains the same position relative to the sun. ... Now I want to know from you if you, with the help of your marvellous glasses, have observed such a phenomenon, which will be, beyond doubt, a sure means to convince even the most obstinate mind. I also suspect a similar thing with Mars near the quadrature with the sun; I don't mean a horned or non-horned shape, but only a semicircular and a more full one.
It is now impossible to prove whether this idea occurred to both Galileo and Castelli at the same time, or whether this letter of Castelli made Galileo turn his telescope on Venus to see if it showed phases. Certainly by 11 December Galileo had discovered that Venus did indeed appear as a crescent for on that day he wrote to Giuliano d'Medici expressing the discovery in code. It is of little consequence which scenario is correct, for in either case Castelli came up with one of the most important ideas of the time.
Castelli was most interested in mathematics and hydraulics. He was appointed as a mathematician to the University of Pisa, replacing Galileo, and later at the University of Rome La Sapienza.
Castelli published Mensuration of Running Water, an important work on fluids in motion, and then his Geometrical Demonstrations of the Measure of Running Waters.
Castelli died in Rome. His students included Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer and an early proponent of the air pump. *Wik *SAU
Risposta alle opposizioni, Galileo's principal text on the controversy over floating bodies. Like several of his polemics of his period, it appeared under the name of a colleague, in this case his pupil and friend Castelli. This work was written as a reply to two attacks by Colombe and Grazia on Galileo's 1612 treatises on floating bodies.
1754 Christian von Wolfe (baron) (24 Jan 1679, 9 Apr 1754 at age 75) philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who worked in many subjects but who is best known as the German spokesman of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century philosophical movement characterized by Rationalism. Wolff's first interest was mathematics. Though he made no original contribution to the discipline, he was important in the teaching of mathematics and instrumental in introducing the new mathematics into German universities. Later, as a philosopher, he developed the most impressive coherent system of his century. Thoroughly eclectic, influenced by Leibniz and Descartes, yet he continued fundamental themes of Aristotle. His system was important in making the discoveries of modern science known in Germany. *TIS
1920 Moritz Benedikt Cantor (23 Aug 1829 in Mannheim, Baden (now Germany)- 9/10 April 1920 in Heidelberg, Germany) best remembered for the four volume work Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik which traces the history of mathematics up to 1799. The first volume was published in 1880 and the last volume appeared in 1908. *SAU
Many historians credit him for founding a new discipline in a field that had hitherto lacked the sound, conscientious, and critical methods of other fields of history.
1951 Vilhelm F(riman) K(oren) Bjerknes (14 Mar 1862, 9 Apr 1951 at age 89) was a Norwegian meteorologist and physicist, one of the founders of the modern science of weather forecasting. As a young boy, Bjerknes assisted his father, Carl Bjerknes (a professor of mathematics) in carrying out experiments to verify the theoretical predictions that resulted from his father's hydrodynamic research. After graduating from university, Bjerknes moved on to his own work applying hydrodynamic and thermodynamic theories to atmospheric and hydrospheric conditions in order to predict future weather conditions. His work in meteorology and on electric waves was important in the early development of wireless telegraphy. He evolved a theory of cyclones known as the polar front theory with his son Jakob. *TIS
Vilhelm Bjerknes with his wife Honoria and his first two children, Karl Anton and Jacob Bjerknes, circa 1898
Vilhelm Bjerknes with his brother Ernst Wilhelm Bjerknes (left) and his sister-in-law, Norway's first female professor, Kristine Bonnevie at her cabin Snefugl (snowbird?) at Mysuseter circa 1946,
1953 Hans Reichenbach (26 Sept 1891 in Hamburg, Germany - 9 April 1953 in Los Angeles, California, USA) wrote on induction, probability and the philosophy of science. However, in the United States he also wrote major works on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics and on time. "...Let us assume that the three dimensions of space are visualized in the customary fashion, and let us substitute a color for the fourth dimension. Every physical object is liable to changes in color as well as in position. An object might, for example, be capable of going through all shades from red through violet to blue. A physical reaction between any two bodies is possible only if they are close to each other in space as well as in color. Bodies of different colors would penetrate each other witout interference ... "*SAU
1983 Yozo Matsushima (February 11, 1921 – April 9, 1983) was a Japanese mathematician. The first paper published by Matsushima contained a proof that a conjecture of Hans Zassenhaus was false. Zassenhaus had conjectured that every semisimple Lie algebra L over a field of prime characteristic, with [L, L] = L, is the direct sum of simple ideals. Matsushima constructed a counterexample. He then developed a proof that Cartan subalgebras of a complex Lie algebra are conjugate. However, Japanese researchers were out of touch with the research done in the West, and Matsushima was unaware that French mathematician Claude Chevalley had already published a proof. When he obtained details of another paper of Chevalley through a review in Mathematical Reviews, he was able to construct the proofs for himself. *Wik
2019 Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp (September 6, 1940; Dover, Ohio - April 9, 2019) is an American mathematician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics and EECS at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp is known for his work in information theory and combinatorial game theory. While an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a Putnam Fellow in 1961. With John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy, he co-authored Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, leading to his recognition as one of the founders of combinatorial game theory. He also published a book on the simple (but complex) game of dots and boxes. Outside of mathematics and computer science, Berlekamp has also been active in money management. In 1986, he began information-theoretic studies of commodity and financial futures. In 1989, Berlekamp purchased the largest interest in a trading company named Axcom Trading Advisors. After the firm's futures trading algorithms were rewritten, Axcom's Medallion Fund had a return (in 1990) of 55%, net of all management fees and transaction costs. The fund has subsequently continued to realize annualized returns exceeding 30% under management by James Harris Simons and his Renaissance Technologies Corporation. Berlekamp and his wife Jennifer had two daughters and a son and lived in Piedmont, California. *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
"Read Euler, read Euler. He is the master of us all."
Some years ago in my high school class I quoted the famous "Read Euler" quote with the preamble, "As a great mathematician once said, ... and then the quote."..
A couple of days later a student mentioned laughingly that another student had thought the quote was created by me (???a great mathematician???). The student paused for a minute and then responded, tentatively, "You didn't..(long pause)....did you?".
I was reminded of this because I have recently been learning more about Euler reading articles by Professor Ed Sandifer.. and especially enjoyed a footnote about the origin of the phrase on his article on Euler as a Teacher.
Let us start with the Great Quotation, dubiously attributed to Laplace by Guglielmo Libri about 1846: Lisez Euler, lisez Euler, c'est notre maître à tous. We traditionally translate this as Read Euler, read Euler. He is the master of us all. This gave Bill Dunham a title befitting his most excellent book, [Dunham 1998] but there are other ways to translate it. Because maˆ itre = master, teacher and "notre … à tous" can mean "of us all" or "notre" can be assigned to modify "maître", leaving "à tous" to mean "all things", other valid translations include: Read Euler, read Euler. He is our master in all things. Read Euler, read Euler. He is the teacher of us all. Read Euler, read Euler. He is our teacher in all things. etc.
(Arjen Dijksman commented...
Professor Sandifer's column "How Euler Euler did it" is a great source to learn about Euler.
Sandifer's alternative translation of "à tous" is however linguistically incorrect. "A tous" means "of us all".
"He is our master in all things" would be "C'est notre maître en tout" or "...en toutes choses" in French.
The footnote is about the quote at the beginning: Libri was a scoundrel, a forger, a book thief and an indifferent mathematician, [Rice 2003] but he did write a decent history of mathematics. In Libri's defense, note that he claims that he heard these words "de sa propre bouche", from Laplace's own mouth, not that Laplace actually wrote them down. [WikiQuote]
For Bourbaki, Poincaré was the devil incarnate. For students of chaos and fractals, Poincaré is of course God on Earth. ~Marshall Stone
The 98th day of the year, 98 is the smallest number that starts a sequence of three consecutive numbers with at least 3 prime divisors. (What would be the smallest number to start a sequence of four numbers with at least four prime divisors?)
98 is the sum of fourth powers of the first three integers, 14 + 24 + 34 Only one larger year day is the sum of the first 3 nth powers .
98 is the smallest composite number whose reversal 89 is a Fibonacci prime. (Students might consider variations of this, is there a prime whose reversal is a composite Fibonacci number, or a Fibonacci composite whose reversal is a prime, or .... GO FOR THE GOLD, a Prime Fibonacci number whose reversal is a prime Fibonacci number?)
98 is a ambinumeral, rotating it 180 degrees produces another integer, 86.
98 is a palindrome in base 5 (343) , and base 6 (242
If you take a number and add it to its reversal, such as 104 + 401 = 505, you get a palindrome. And if you don't, just repeat the process. 75+57 = 132, and 132 + 231= 333. If you try this process with 97, be patient. It takes 24 steps to get a palindrome.... but you do get a palindrome.
EVENTS
1019 Al-Biruni observed an eclipse of the sun at Lamghan, north of Kabul. He wrote:-
"... at sunrise we saw that approximately one-third of the sun was eclipsed and that the eclipse was waning." The quality and detail of his observations allows his location to be closely determined.
1610 On 8 April Kepler received a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, and a few days later the Tuscan ambassador in Prague transmitted Galileo’s request for an opinion about the startling new telescopic discoveries. What a contrast with 1597, when Kepler, an unknown high-school teacher, had sought in vain Galileo’s reaction to his own book! Kepler was now the distinguished imperial mathematician, whose opinion mattered; he responded generously and quickly with a long letter of approval.
He promptly published his letter as dissertatio cum nuncio sidereo; in accepting the new observations with enthusiasm, he also reminded his readers of the earlier history of the telescope, his own work on the regular solids and on possible inhabitants of the moon, and his arguments against an infinite universe. A few months later, in the second of the only three known letters that Galileo wrote directly to Kepler, the Italian astronomer stated, “I thank you because you were the first one, and practically the only one, to have complete faith in my assertions.” *Encyclopedia.com Thony Christie sent me some corrections on Kepler's introduction to this document: "I quote from Mario Biagioli's Galileo Courtier:
Kepler's dedication of his Conversation with the Sidereal Messenger to Giuliano de' Medici (the Medici ambassador in Prague […]) offers interesting clues about the ways in which scientific networks were often embedded in noble patronage networks. Kepler acknowledged that he obtained a copy of the Sidereus from Giuliano de' Medici and that, when called to the Medici palace in Prague on April 13 [note date!], he was read Galileo's invitation to respond to the Sidereus, an invitation which was reinforced by the ambassador's "own exhortations". It is important to not that Kepler did not receive the letter from Galileo but that it was read to him by the Medici ambassador.
As you can see the copy of the Sidereus was sent by Galileo to Giuliano de' Medici who gave it to Kepler with what amounted to an order to write a criticism of it. As always during their rather brief and fragmentary correspondence Galileo's behavior towards Kepler was less than civil." The University of Oklahoma has a digitized copy of Siderus Nunci with Galileo's signature on the title page
.
1794 Joseph and Mary Priestley sailed from England on April 8, 1794 and after a long and rough passage, reached New York on June 4th. They joined their sons who had preceded them and who were engaged in purchasing land in Pennsylvania where they hoped to found a settlement of English immigrants. Although Priestley was fully informed about this venture and had decided to join them in living in the settlement when it was established, he was not one of the planners and, in fact, was not overly enthusiastic about it. During the 10 days he was in New York, he was visited by Governor Clinton and other leading citizens and several public expressions of welcome were made. However some of the local clergy used the occasion of Trinity Sunday, June 15th, to preach against Priestley's religious views. They appeared to fear his influence. On June 18th, Priestley went on to Philadelphia where he was also honored and invited to stay. However, he was determined to press on to Northumberland to join his sons. At this time he seemed to have some idea that he would be able to live in the country, in Northumberland, and make frequent trips into the city of Philadelphia. *Bill Weston, A Brief Biography of Joseph Priestley
Mary Priestley died 17 September 1796. By 1801, Priestley had become so ill that he could no longer write or experiment. He died on the morning of 6 February 1804, aged seventy and was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.
Priestley's epitaph reads:
Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the
Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.
I will lay me down in peace and sleep till
I awake in the morning of the resurrection.
1796 Gauss enters in his diary a note that he has proved quadratic reciprocity. He will prove it again seven times in his life. Euler stated the theorem in 1783 without proof. Legendre was the first to p ublish a proof, but it was fallacious. Gauss became the first to publish a correct proof. The quadratic reciprocity theorem was Gauss's favorite theorem from number theory. He referred to it as the "aureum theorema" (golden theorem). The theorem says that if p and q are distinct odd primes, then the congruences x2=q (mod p) x2=p (mod q)are either both solvable, or both unsolvable except when they are both equal to 3 (mod 4). If they are both equal to 3 (mod 4) then one is solvable and the other is not *Mathworld, Wolfram
*Genial Guass Gottingen
1799 The date of the still uninterpreted cryptic entry "REV. GALEN" in Gauss’s scientific diary. *VFR There is a previous insertion that also remains uninterpreted.He entered "Vicimus GEGAN" for October 21, 1796.
1829 After having met Niels Henrik Abel in Berlin, August Leopold Crelle had published his work in his journal, and tried to help him acquire a University position. After Abel returned to Norway he lived on gifts and loans that he never repaid. On the 8th of April, Crelle wrote to tell him that the University of Berlin had offered him a Professorship, not knowing that Abel had died of tuberculosis two days earlier. *John Derbyshire, Unknown Quantity
1940 Samuel F. B. Morse appears on a two cent stamp in the U.S.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor and painter. He is best known for inventing the single-wire telegraph and Morse Code. Morse's invention was significant because it allowed for near-instant communication around the world. Although he didn't invent the telegraph, he developed it, commercialized it, and invented the code that bears his name. Morse was a Yale graduate who trained as an artist in England.
1943 The Rockefeller Foundation review announced that the “differential analyzer” at MIT was built at a cost of $130,500.
Original wheel-and-disc integrator from Bush's differential analyzer on display at the MIT Museum, and the complete machine
*MIT EDU
1959 Today in 1959 a team of computer manufacturers, users, and university people led by Grace Hopper meets to discuss the creation of a new programming language that would be called COBOL. The Painter Flynn.
In 1947, the largest sunspot group recorded was observed on the sun's southern hemisphere. Its size was estimated at 7 billion square miles, or an area of 6100 millionths of the Sun's visible hemisphere. Sunspots are areas of somewhat cooler surface than the surrounding solar gases, and appear as dark spots on the solar surface. Astronomers measure the sizes of sunspots as millionth fractions of the Sun's visible area. Typically, a big sunspot measures 300 to 500 millionths, whereas the entire surface area of the Earth is only 169 millionths of the solar disk. *TIS
As with all records, this one was broken on November 23, 2020. It had 17 sunspots at its peak and covered an area six times the surface of the Earth.
1947 Super Sunspot
1920 solar array
1983 John Sculley is named president and CEO of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs convinced him to leave his position as president of PepsiCo. While Steve Jobs wanted the position of president for himself, then-CEO Mike Markkula did not think Jobs was ready to take on that responsibility.
Jobs wanted Sculley based on his success growing Pepsi’s marketshare against Coke. He wanted that same type of marketing success for Apple against IBM. Part of computer industry lore, Jobs reportedly asked Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Ultimately, Sculley and Jobs entered into a power struggle, Sculley convinced Apple’s board of directors to strip Jobs of all power within the company, and Jobs left Apple. One has to wonder how the computer industry would be different today if Steve Jobs had been given lead of his company in 1983 instead of Apple opting for “adult supervision”. Recent history with companies such as Facebook, Google, and even Apple since Jobs’ return, has shown that visionaries can make great leaders of technology companies. *This Day in Tech History
1991 Java development begins in earnest: On this day, Sun's Java team moves from Sun Microsystems to work in secret on its "Oak" development project (later re-named "Java.")*CHM
Java was born in June 1991 as a project called "Oak" under the development by a small team of engineers working for Sun Microsystems. They called themselves the Green Team: James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton.
The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office. Later the project went by the name Green and was finally renamed Java, from Java coffee, a type of coffee from Indonesia.
2004 Ben Green and Terence Tao published a proof that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers at arxiv. The previously open conjecture dates back to work of Waring and Lagrange from the late 18th Century. Paul Erdos had conjectured in 1936, with his lifelong friend Paul Turan, that states that if the sum of the reciprocals of the members of a set A of positive integers diverges, then A contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. It was proven by Klaus Roth in 1952, and generalized to arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions by Szemerédi in 1975 in what is now known as Szemerédi's theorem.
Erdős' conjecture on arithmetic progressions can be viewed as a stronger version of Szemerédi's theorem. Because the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges, the Green–Tao theorem on arithmetic progressions is a special case of the conjecture.
Although the proof asserts arbitrarily long such strings, the longest string presently known is 25 primes long
43142746595714191+23681770*223092870n for n = 0,1, ... ,25.
Ben Green
Terence Tao
2018 In geometric graph theory, the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, named after Hugo Hadwiger and Edward Nelson, asks for the minimum number of colors required to color the plane such that no two points at distance 1 from each other have the same color. The problem seems to date back to 1950, but there is some uncertainty about how it circulated until it reached Martin Gardner in 1960. At that time it was known that the minimum had to be at least three, as an equilateral triangle with sides of one unit would confirm. Within a year of the Gardner article, the brothers Leo and William Moser demonstrated a graph, now called the Moser Spindle, of seven vertices with each edge one unit in length that proved that a fourth color was necessary.
*Moser Spindle, *P. Honner, Quanta Magazine
It seems that around the same time, 1961 or so, John R. Isbell. demonstrated that using hexagons of "just under a unit diameter" we could demonstrate that the number could not be more than 7, and there it sat, for almost 70 years. Then, in 2018, a amateur mathematician Aubrey de Grey found a 1581-vertex, non-4-colorable unit-distance graph. The proof is computer assisted. Since then lots of people are attacking the problem and they are already whittling down the number of vertices for a five colored graph, but as of this moment, it seems the question is narrowed down to either 5, 6 or 7 colors. Place your bets! *Quanta Magazine, Wikipedia, The Mathematical Coloring Book.
BIRTHS
1608 Honoré Fabri (8 April 1608 in Le Grand Abergement, Ain, France - 8 March 1688 in Rome, Italy)was a French Jesuit who worked on astronomy, physics and mathematics. His lecture
s on natural philosophy were published in 1646 as Tractatus physicus de motu locali. In this work he uses the parallelogram law for forces, correctly applying it to deduce the law of reflection and the motion of a body acted on simultaneously by two forces.*SAU (This seems to be one of the earlier statements of the law)
1732 David Rittenhouse (8 Apr 1732; died 26 Jun 1796 at age 64) American astronomer, instrument maker and inventor who was an early observer of the atmosphere of Venus. For observations for the transit of Venus on 3 Jun 1769, he constructed a high precision pendulum clock, an astronomical quadrant, an equal altitude instrument, and an astronomical transit. He was the first one in America to put spider web as cross-hairs in the focus of his telescope. He is generally credited with inventing the vernier compass and possibly the automatic needle lifter. He was professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin consulted him on various occasions. For Thomas Jefferson he standardized the foot by pendulum measurements in a project to establish a decimal system of weights and measures.*TIS I recently discovered a blog about Rittenhouse at The Renaissance Mathematicus by the wonderful Thony Christie that tells a wonderful story about Rittenhouse I had never heard. So as not to spoil it, I'll tease you with the last line: "the man who worked so hard to witness a once in a lifetime event and then missed it."
1779 Johann Salamo Christoph Schweigger (8 Apr 1779; 6 Sep 1857 at age 78) German physicist who invented the galvanometer (1820), a device to measure the strength of an electric current. He developed the principle from Oersted's experiment (1819) which showed that current in a wire will deflect a compass needle. Schweigger realized that suggested a basic measuring instrument, since a stronger current would produce a larger deflection, and he increased the effect by winding the wire many times in a coil around the magnetic needle. He named this instrument a “galvanometer” in honour of Luigi Galvani, the professor who gave Volta the idea for the first battery. Thomas Seebeck (1770-1831) named the innovative coil, Schweigger's multiplier. It became the basis of moving coil instruments and loudspeakers. *TIS
Schweigger's multiplier
1903 Marshall Harvey Stone (April 8, 1903, New York City – January 9, 1989, Madras, India) was an American mathematician who contributed to real analysis, functional analysis, and the study of Boolean algebras. He is best known for the Stone-Weierstrass theorem on uniform approximation of continuous functions by polynomials. Stone was the son of Harlan Fiske Stone, who was the Chief Justice of the United States in 1941–1946. Marshall Stone’s family expected him to become a lawyer like his father, but he became enamored of mathematics while he was a Harvard University undergraduate. He completed a Harvard Ph.D. in 1926, with a thesis on differential equations that was supervised by George David Birkhoff. Between 1925 and 1937, he taught at Harvard, Yale University, and Columbia University. Stone was promoted to a full Professor at Harvard in 1937. Stone did an outstanding job of making the Chicago department eminent again, mainly by hiring Paul Halmos, André Weil, Saunders Mac Lane, Antoni Zygmund, and Shiing-Shen Chern.*Wik
1903 Aurel Friedrich Wintner (8 April 1903, Budapest, Hungary – 15 January 1958, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) was a mathematician noted for his research in mathematical analysis, number theory, differential equations and probability theory. He was one of the founders of probabilistic number theory. He received his Ph.D from the University of Leipzig in 1928 under the guidance of Leon Lichtenstein. *Wik In 1929 he published the first proofs of the basic facts in Hilbert space— the fundamental mathematical construct in the then-developing physical theory of quantum mechanics. [DSB 14, 454] *VFR
2007 François Georges René Bruhat ( 8 April 1929 – 17 July 2007) was a French mathematician who worked on algebraic groups. The Bruhat order of a Weyl group, the Bruhat decomposition, and the Schwartz–Bruhat functions are named after him.
He was the son of physicist (and associate director of the École Normale Supérieure during the occupation) Georges Bruhat, and brother of physicist Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat.
DEATHS
1461 Georg von Peuerbach, (30 May 1423, 8 Apr 1461 at age 37) Austrian mathematician and astronomer who promoted the use of Arabic numerals (introduced 250 years earlier in place of Roman numerals), especially in a table of sines he calculated with unprecedented accuracy. He died before this project was finished, and his pupil, Regiomontanus continued it until his own death. Peuerbach was a follower of Ptolomy's astronomy. He insisted on the solid reality of the crystal spheres of the planets, going somewhat further than in Ptolomy's writings. He calculated tables of eclipses in Tabulae Ecclipsium, observed Halley's comet in Jun 1456 and the lunar eclipse of 3 Sep 1457 from a site near Vienna. Peurrbach wrote on astronomy, his observations and devised astronomical instruments.*TIS Peuerbach's Theoricae Novae Planetarum, (New Theories of the Planets- below) was composed about 1454 was published in 1473 by Regiomontanus' printing press in Nuremberg. While the book was involved in attempting a technical resolution of the theories of Eudoxus and Ptolemy, Peuerbach claimed that the movement of the planets was determined by the Sun, and this has been seen as a step towards the Copernican theory. This book was read by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and became the standard astronomical text well into the seventeenth century.
1895 Richard Dudgeon, a Scottish-American machinist, died Apr. 8, 1895, at the age of around 76; his birth date is unknown. Dudgeon came to New York at a young age from Scotland and, being mechanically gifted, was soon working in various shops in New York City. In 1851, he invented what he called a "portable hydraulic press", which indeed it was, although we would now call it a hydraulic jack. This was the first new heavy-lifting device since the jack-screw, which the Romans had used 1800 years earlier. Work the pump-handle a few dozen times and one could raise 100 tons into the air (or slowly lower it to the ground). When Henry Gorringe, in 1879-81, lowered the Cleopatra Needle obelisk in Alexandria, Egypt, and then raised it again in Central Park in New York City, he used two Dudgeon jacks to do the lowering and raising (first image; you can see both jacks on top of the stacks of wooden timbers, just below the obelisk; a third Dudgeon jack was encased in lead and buried in the time capsule beneath the obelisk in Central Park).
Dudgeon's other technical innovation was a steam road carriage. He was not the first to make one (see our post on Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot), but his seems to have been the first that was actually functional. It was built by 1857 and Dudgeon would drive it from his home to his shop, in spite of the protests of passers-by and horses (he said he invented the device because he wanted to end the cruel treatment of horses by carriage owners, but I am not sure the horses appreciated this). Unfortunately for Dudgeon, in 1858 he put his wagon on temporary display in the New York Crystal Palace, built in 1853 in emulation of the original Crystal Palace in London, and on Oct. 5, 1858, the strangely flammable steel and glass fabric of the New York Palace burned to the ground, taking the steam carriage with it.*LH
Obelisk in Alexandria, intended for New York City, being lowered and supported by two Dudgeon hydraulic jacks, from Henry Gorringe, Egyptian Obelisks, 1882,
1913 Julius (Gyula )König (16 December 1849 – 8 April 1913) was a Hungarian mathematician. His mathematical publications in foreign languages appeared under the name Julius König. His son Dénes Kőnig is the famous graph theorist. Kőnig worked in many mathematical fields. His work on polynomial ideals, discriminants and elimination theory can be considered as a link between Leopold Kronecker and David Hilbert as well as Emmy Noether. Later on his ideas were simplified considerably, to the extent that today they are only of historical interest. Kőnig already considered material influences on scientific thinking and the mechanisms which stand behind thinking.*Wik One of his early ideas was a paper of 1872 which looked at intuitive ways to prove the consistency of non-Euclidean geometries. He published many research papers in analysis, but his greatest significance in this area comes from the excellent textbooks which he wrote on the topic.*VFR
1919 Roland Baron von Eötvös (27 Jul 1848, 8 Apr 1919 at age 70)was a Hungarian physicist who studied at Heidelberg where he was taught by Kirchhoff, Helmholtz and Bunsen. Eötvös introduced the concept of molecular surface tension and published on capillarity (1876-86). For the rest of his life he concentrated on study of the Earth's gravitational field. He developed the Eötvös torsion balance, long unsurpassed in precision, which gave experimental proof that inertial mass and gravitational mass, to a high degree of accuracy, are equivalent - which later was a major principle of Albert Einstein.*TIS
1925 Frank Stephen Baldwin (10 Apr 1838, 8 Apr 1925 at age 87) American inventor best-known for his development of the Monroe calculator. Baldwin began in 1870 to experiment with the design of mechanical calculators. The device was patented and marketed in 1875 (No. 159,244). The improved 1875 machine initiated the development of the second fundamental principle in rotary four-rules calculators which became known as "The Baldwin Principle." Baldwin developed many more calculators during his life. His last model was the forerunner of the Monroe machine. The Monroe Calculator Company was formed in 1912 and was a pioneer in electric adding machines. The Monroe Calculator was used extensively in the 1930's. *TIS
1968 Harold Delos Babcock (24 Jan 1882, 8 Apr 1968 at age 86) American astronomer who with his son, Horace, invented the solar magnetograph (1951), for detailed observation of the Sun's magnetic field. With their magnetograph the Babcocks measured the distribution of magnetic fields over the solar surface to unprecedented precision and discovered magnetically variable stars. In 1959 Harold Babcock announced that the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity periodically. Babcock's precise laboratory studies of atomic spectra allowed others to identify the first "forbidden" lines in the laboratory and to discover the rare isotopes of oxygen. With C.E. St. John he greatly improved the precision of the wavelengths of some 22,000 lines in the solar spectrum, referring them to newly-determined standards. *TIS
A new instrument for measuring and recording weak magnetic fields on the surface of the sun has been developed for use with the 150-foot solar telescope and 75-foot spectrograph of the Hale Solar Laboratory. Principal features include: a superior grating of high resolving power for use in the fifth-order spectrum; an electro-o tic analyzer for polarization; a double-slit detector for the longitudinal Zeeman effect; and a self-sync ronous system by which the disk of the sun is scanned in a raster of parallel traces, the results as to magnetic intensity and polarity being presented conformally on the screen of a cathode-ray tube and recorded by a camera. The noise level (about 0.1 gauss) is such that fields of the order of 1 gauss can be recorded readily. The method of calibration is described, and the possibility is pointed out of using the instrument, with a slight optical modification, for studying small Doppler shifts in the sun's atmosphere.
Magnetogram
2005, Douglas Geoffrey Northcott, FRS (31 December 1916, London – 8 April 2005) was a British mathematician who worked on ideal theory. ... while a prisoner of war, ... Northcott was able to think about mathematics; indeed, thinking about mathematics probably helped him survive his war experiences. Sometimes he tried to reconstruct proofs of results that he had learnt as a student; at other; he attempted to build up a theory of integration for functions with values in a Banach space. He recorded his results about this theory in a notebook that he kept in his gas-mask case. On one occasion his gas-mask was stolen and he never saw it again, and so he had to start again. His second notebook survived the war and, in due course, provided material for his Ph.D. thesis and his fellowship dissertation. *SAU
2008 Graham Higman (19 Jan 1917 in Louth, Lincolnshire, England - 8 April 2008 in Oxford, England) is known for his outstanding work in all aspects of the theory of groups. He published on units in group rings, the subject of his doctoral thesis, in 1940 then there was a break in his publication record during the time he worked in the Meteorological Office. His 1948 papers are on somewhat different topics, being on topological spaces and linkages. They show the influences of Henry Whitehead and, to a lesser extent, Max Newman. *SAU
1929 Peter Ware Higgs (29 May 1929 - 8 April 2024) is an English theoretical physicist, the namesake of the Higgs boson. In the late 1960s, Higgs and others proposed a mechanism that would endow particles with mass, even though they appeared originally in a theory - and possibly in the Universe! - with no mass at all. The basic idea is that all particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field. which is carried by the Higgs bosons. This mechanism is an important part of the Standard Model of particles and forces, for it explains the masses of the carriers of the weak force, responsible for beta-decay and for nuclear reactions that fuel the Sun. The particle was discovered on 4 July 2012 at the Large Hadron Accelerator.
On April 8 of 2024 just as the moon was totally darkening the skis over parts of the U S, Peter Higgs died at home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 94.
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