Sunday, 10 May 2026

On this Day in Math - May 10

   



Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis.


~Augustin Fresnel 


The 130th day of the year; 130 is the sum of the factorials of the first five terms of the Fibonacci sequence.
Did you know that any four terms of the Fibonacci sequence will give you a Pythagorean triangle? If we use 3, 5, 8, 13 you can get 3+13 = 39, 2*5*8 = 80, and 3*8 + 5 * 13 = 89, and {39, 80, 89} is a Pythagorean Right triangle with an area of 1560 (which is 3 * 5 * 8 * 13) Which makes it a Heronian triangle. First observed by Charles W. Raine in 1948. For more on this Pythagonacci connection

130 is the sum of the squares of the divisors of 10, ( \( 1^2 + 2^2 + 5^2 + 10^2 = 130 \)
130 is also the only number equal to the sum of the squares of its first 4 divisors: 130 = 1^2 + 2^2 + 5^2 + 10^2.*Prime Curios

This is the 46th day of the year that is the sum of two squares.It is the sum of two squares in two different ways. 130 = 11² + 3² = 9² + 7².

Haven't mentioned the hexgonal numbers much this year so far, but 130 is the largest number that cannot be written as the  sum of four hexagonal numbers.
Hexagonal numbers are given by the formula H(n) = n(2n-1), and produce the sequence 1, 6, 15, 28, 45, 66, 91... (can you find  numbers that ARE the sum of four )  (All the even perfect numbers are in that sequence..)  





EVENTS

1741 d'Alembert is (finally) accepted to the French Academy of Sciences.  He had applied five times since March 1 of the  same year.  He was accepted as an adjunct associate astronomer at the age of 24. *Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d'Alembert: science and the Englightenment; pg 25




1752 Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot (some say 50 ft) (12 m)-tall iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. Based on his observations, Franklin had proposed an experiment with an elevated rod or wire to "draw down the electric fire" from a cloud, with the experimenter standing in the protection of an enclosure similar to a soldier's sentry box.
Before Franklin could put his proposal into practice, D'Alibard performed his experiment in Paris. One week later, M. Delor repeated the experiment in Paris, followed in July by an Englishman, John Canton. But one unfortunate physicist did not fare so well. Georg Wilhelm Reichmann attempted to reproduce the experiment, according to Franklin's instructions, standing inside a room. A glowing ball of charge traveled down the string, jumped to his forehead and killed him instantly - providing history with the first documented example of ball lightning in the process.
As for Franklin, he was apparently unaware of these other experiments when he undertook his own version during a thunderstorm in June 1752, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Unlike Reichmann, he quite sensibly stood under a shed roof to ensure he was holding a dry, non-conducting portion of the kite string.*AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY News

 It is said that Dalibard used wine bottles to ground the pole, and he successfully extracted electricity from a low cloud. It is not known (or is doubted) whether Franklin ever performed his proposed experiment




1760 Euler writes the tenth of his Letters to a German Princess.  This one on the "Compression of the air. " .  "The explanation of sound, which I have had the honor of presenting to you Highness, leads me forward to..." (The Euler Archive)

Letters to a German Princess, On Different Subjects in Physics and Philosophy were a series of 234 letters written by the mathematician Leonhard Euler between 1760 and 1762 addressed to Friederike Charlotte of Brandenburg-Schwedt and her younger sister Louise. *Wik




1810 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was summoned by the King of Prussia to be Professor of Astronomy at the University at Konigsburg and to supervise the construction of an Observatory, becoming its first Director. In 1819 he developed and published Fourier series, three years before Fourier! In 1824, he first systematically studied the Bessel functions. In 1838, he made the first observation of a stellar parallax, hence of a stellar distance, of 61 Cygni, about 11 light-years away. Its parallax is less than .3" (or .3' ??) of arc – the aberration due to the Earth's motion is about 40'. He had started working on this about thirty years previously. Henderson, 1839, and Struve, 1840, made independent measurements of a stellar parallax.

Bessel functions describe the radial part of vibrations of a circular membrane.







1831 Everiste Galois was arrested, following a banquet, of about 200 young republicans, that he actively attended.*VFR (SEE MAY 9)




1845  The Spitalfields Mathematical Society  This mathematical society was founded in 1717 by Joseph Middleton who taught mathematics to sailors who required mathematical skills for navigating. It met in a public house, the Monmouth's Head, in Spitalfields which is a district just outside the east side of the city of London. The 'Mathematical Society', as it called itself, moved its meeting place a number of time over the following years but remaining in Spitalfields. In 1725 it moved to the White Horse in Wheeler Street, then in 1735 to the Ben Johnson's Head in Woodseer Street. 

Dozens of these societies were formed in the early 18th century and contributed to the learning of many tradespeople, and the financial sustenance of many mathematicians of the period.  Thomas Simpson was an early member of the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, being one of 49 members in 1736Simpson was the most distinguished of a group of itinerant lecturers who taught in the London coffee houses. This may seems strange but in fact at this time coffee houses were sometimes called the Penny Universities because of the cheap education they provided. They would charge an entrance fee of one penny and then while customers drank coffee they could listen to lectures. Different coffee houses catered to specific interests such as art, business, law and mathematics. For example De Moivre used Slaughter's Coffee House in St Martin's Lane as a base during these years, and William Jones, who was a friend of Simpson, was able to make a living lecturing in coffee houses such as Child's Coffee House in St Paul's Churchyard. 

The actual death date of the society is not known to me, but the Society wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society who responded on 10 May 1845:-

A meeting of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society took place yesterday, and I brought forward the suggestions contained in your recent letters to me relating to the venerable Mathematical Society of London, and the Council were unanimous in regretting that this ancient Society of 130 years standing should be on the eve of dissolution and decline. The members of the Council were also, I believe, unanimous that if the nineteen surviving members of the Mathematical Society should in their liberality and public spirit wish to keep the mathematical and astronomical and philosophical portions of their library together, and should kindly and considerately offer to present it to the Royal Astronomical Society, that the Council of the latter would not only be grateful to them for this act of judicious benevolence, but would be willing to elect all the members of the Mathematical Society members for life of the Royal Astronomical Society.

*Assorted notes but much from *SAU, McTutor, Wik

Petticoat Lane Market, Spitalfields, c. 1890.





1869 the first transcontinental railroad to run West out of Chicago was completed, running to Promontory, Utah. Amidst a crowd of dignitaries and workers, with the engines No. 119 and Jupiter practically touching noses, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads were joined together. Telegraph operators transmitting to both coasts transmit the blows of the hammer as they fall on a golden spike. The nation listened as west and east came together in undivided union. *TIS

The ceremony for the driving of the "Last Spike" at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869




1898 Dewar becomes the first person to liquefy Hydrogen, working in the basement laboratory of the Ri with only a few assistants. *Royal Institution web page


1899 Parker Brothers put out Instant Insanity in 1967. But the puzzle itself was much older. Here's a patent filed on May 10, 1899 (issued April 3, 1900) by F.A. Schossow for a game that would be sold as the Katzenjammer Puzzle.  *Dave Richeson

The puzzle consists of four cubes with faces colored with four colors (commonly red, blue, green, and white). The objective of the puzzle is to stack these cubes in a column so that each side of the stack (front, back, left, and right) shows each of the four colors. The distribution of colors on each cube is unique, and the order in which the four cubes are stacked is irrelevant as long as each side shows every color. 

A solved stack is shown below, and the nets of each cube if you wish to make your own.








1910 Florence Nightingale was presented with the badge of honour of the Norwegian Red Cross Society. *VictorianWeb   She would die a few months later on13 August 1910




1925 John T. Scopes was given a preliminary hearing before three judges. He had been arrested and charged under a new Tennessee's state law, the Butler act, which prohibited the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools. Scopes had agreed to participate in a challenge to that law, with the support of local leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, and the American Civil Liberties Union. A few weeks later, at what became known as the Scope's Monkey Trial, he was found guilty and fined $100. Although upon appeal the fine was ruled excessive and over-ruled, the state law itself was not found unconstitutional. Thereafter, the law was not enforced, but it was not repealed until 1967.*TIS (The state of Tennessee still seems to be struggling with this issue, 2011)




1933 Kurt Schutte, the last of Hilbert’s sixty-nine doctoral students, defends his dissertation on logic. For the full list see Hilbert’s Gesammelte Abhandlungen, vol. 3, pp. 431–433. *VFR


In 1949, the first planetarium in the U.S. owned by a university opened at the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Morehead Planetarium, one of the largest in the U.S., was the gift of John Motley Morehead III (1870-1965), class of 1891. The Morehead Building, erected at the north end of the campus, included the 68-ft dome, 300-seat Star Theater with a Zeiss Model II Star Projector. Morehead was an industrialist and chemist who commercially developed production of calcium carbide, basic to manufacturing acetylene gas, which led to the founding of Union Carbide Corporation. As the U.S. space program began, the planetarium provided important celestial navigation training for U.S. astronauts in the Mercury program.*TIS




1960 Triton ended her 84 day, 36,014 mile circumnavigation of the globe, the first by a submerged submarine. The ship generally followed the path of the first round the world voyager, Magellan. [Navy Facts, 181, 204] *VFR (Magellan's circumnavigation took three years, On August 10, 1519 to September 6, 1522. Of the 237 men who set out on five ships, only 18 completed the circumnavigation and managed to return to Spain in 1522.  As far as I know the Triton had no casualties.)



2012 National Abacus Day ((Soroban Day) in Japan. It was established in 1968 and commemorates the sound of moving beads on the soroban, a Japanese abacus. While not a major public holiday, it recognizes the enduring legacy of the soroban. 

 By manipulating beads, the user of an abacus can perform simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. *CHM

When I was there in the 1990's the soroban was still used widely by merchants and businesses and taught in schools.  Japanese third- and fourth-graders are required to practice soroban in math class, according to the education ministry's website.

Before 2020, DODEA (US Military dependents) students participated in soroban competitions alongside Japanese students in Okinawa and mainland Japan. American students on Okinawa competed for more than 20 years.



From My Personal Collection, sign for abacus school



2013 An annular solar eclipse took place on May 10, 2013, with a magnitude of 0.9544. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partially obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is smaller than the Sun, causing the Sun to look like an annulus (ring), blocking most of the Sun's light. An annular eclipse appears as a partial eclipse over a region thousands of kilometres wide.
Annularity was visible from northern Australia and the southern Pacific Ocean, with the maximum of 6 minutes 3 seconds visible from the Pacific Ocean east of French Polynesia. *Wik  A more recent total Eclipse passed across much of North America on April 9, 2024.




2024 A dramatic blast from the sun set off the highest-level geomagnetic storm in Earth’s atmosphere on Friday that is expected to make the northern lights visible as far south as Florida and Southern California and could interfere with power grids, communications and navigations system.

It is the strongest such storm to reach Earth since Halloween of 2003. That one was strong enough to create power outages in Sweden and damage transformers in South Africa.

The effects could continue through the weekend as a steady stream of emissions from the sun continues to bombard the planet’s magnetic field.

The solar activity is so powerful that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors space weather, issued an unusual storm watch for the first time in 19 years, which was then upgraded to a warning. The agency began observing outbursts on the sun’s surface on Wednesday, with at least five heading in the direction of Earth.  *New York Times

 Julie Lanter in Claryville, Kentucky, caught the aurora on May 10, 2024, 



BIRTHS

1754 Colonel Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet, PC, MP, FRS, FRSE, FSA (10 May 1754 – 21 December 1835), was a Scottish politician, military officer, planter and writer who was one of the first people to use the word "statistics" in the English language in his pioneering work, Statistical Accounts of Scotland, which was published in 21 volumes.




1788 Augustin Jean Fresnel (10 May 1788 - 14 July 1827, aged 39)did important work on optics where he was one of the founders of the wave theory of light.  In 1817, Young had proposed a small transverse component to light, while yet retaining a far larger longitudinal component. Fresnel, by the year 1821, was able to show via mathematical methods that polarization could be explained only if light was entirely transverse, with no longitudinal vibration whatsoever.  In the early 19th century, Poisson declared that since Fresnel’s ideas on the wave nature of light implied that the shadow cast by a disk would contain a bright spot at its center, Fresnel’s ideas were obviously flawed. The spot was later detected, proving Fresnel right!   He is perhaps best known to the general public as the inventor of the Fresnel lens, first adopted in lighthouses while he was a French commissioner of lighthouses, and found in many applications today.*Wikipedia





1821 Baldassarre Boncompagni, (10 May 1821 – 13 April 1894),  noted historian of mathematics. He set up his own publishing house and published his own journal dealing with the history of mathematics from 1868 to 1887. He was responsible for making known the importance of Leonardo Fibonacci to the history of mathematics. *VFR Boncompagni edited Bullettino di bibliografia e di storia delle scienze matematiche e fisiche ("The bulletin of bibliography and history of mathematical and physical sciences") (1868-1887), the first Italian periodical entirely dedicated to the history of mathematics. He edited every article that appeared in the journal. He also prepared and published the first modern edition of Fibonacci's Liber Abaci.*Wik




1847 Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing (10 May 1847 in Burbach (near Siegen), Westphalia, Germany - 11 Feb 1923 in Münster, Germany)introduced Lie algebras independently of Lie in his study of non-euclidean geometry. The classification of the simple Lie algebras by Killing was one of the finest achievements in the whole of mathematical research.*SAU



1900 Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (10 May 1900; 7 Dec 1979 at age 79) was an English-American astronomer who was the first to apply laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies, and the first to conclude that hydrogen and helium are the two most common elements in the universe. During the 1920s, the accepted explanation of the Sun's composition was a calculation of around 65% iron and 35% hydrogen. At Harvard University, in her doctoral thesis (1925), Payne claimed that the sun's spectrum was consistent with another solution: 99% hydrogen with helium, and just 1% iron. She had difficulty persuading her superiors to take her work seriously. It was another 20 years before Payne's original claim was confirmed, by Fred Hoyle. *TIS

*Michael Magri shared her story this way, "In 1925, a young woman named Cecilia Payne wrote a PhD thesis so groundbreaking, it changed science forever — yet almost no one knows her name.

Born in England, Cecilia Payne’s brilliance was obvious early on. But Cambridge wouldn’t award her a degree because she was a woman. So, she left for the United States, earned the first PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College (Harvard’s sister school), and wrote what has since been called “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”

In that thesis, Payne revealed that the Sun — and therefore the stars — are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. At the time, this was considered outrageous. Even her advisor, Henry Norris Russell, urged her not to publish the conclusion. Four years later, he published the same idea — and received the credit.

But Payne didn’t stop. She became one of the world’s leading experts on variable stars. Her work is the foundation of nearly every study on them since. In 1956, she became the first woman promoted to full professor from within Harvard and the first to lead a department there.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin changed how we understand the universe — yet her name rarely appears in textbooks."  

In his paper Russell credited Payne with discovering that the Sun had a different chemical composition from Earth but never shared the rewards of the fame he readily accepted for her work which he’d failed to recognize until years later. *PB Notes

*MacTutor

Linda Hall Org



1904 Edward James McShane (May 10, 1904 – June 1, 1989) is famous for his work in the calculus of variations, Moore-Smith theory of limits, the theory of the integral, stochastic differential equations, and ballistics. In the early 1950s United States senator Joseph R McCarthy whipped up strong feelings against communism. McShane had been asked to complete a questionnaire. One question asked:-
... whether he had ever been involved with organisations that had at any time advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
It was quite a brave move for McShane to reply "yes", because he was an employee of the State of Virginia! At the University of Virginia this sense of humour added to his popularity with both staff and graduate students.. *SAU




1926 Oliver Gordon Selfridge (May 10, 1926 – December 3, 2008), grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges' department stores, was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception."
Selfridge was born in England, educated at Malvern College and Middlesex School and then earned an S.B. from MIT in mathematics in 1945. He then became a graduate student of Norbert Wiener's at MIT, but did not write up his doctoral research and never earned a Ph.D. While at MIT, he acted as one of the earlier reviewers for Wiener's Cybernetics book in 1949. He was also technically a supervisor of Marvin Minsky, and helped organize the first ever public meeting on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Minsky in 1955.
Selfridge wrote important early papers on neural networks and pattern recognition and machine learning, and his "Pandemonium" paper (1959) is generally recognized as a classic in artificial intelligence. In it, Selfridge introduced the notion of "demons" that record events as they occur, recognize patterns in those events, and may trigger subsequent events according to patterns they recognize. Over time, this idea gave rise to Aspect-oriented programming.
In 1968, in their formative paper "The Computer as a Communication Device", J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor introduced a concept known as an OLIVER (Online Interactive Expediter and Responder) which was named in honor of Selfridge.
Selfridge spent his career at Lincoln Laboratory, MIT (where he was Associate Director of Project MAC), Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and GTE Laboratories where he became Chief Scientist. He served on the NSA Advisory Board for 20 years, chairing the Data Processing Panel. Selfridge retired in 1993.
Selfridge also authored four children's books, "Sticks", "Fingers Come In Fives", "All About Mud", and "Trouble With Dragons". *Wik





1958 Ellen Ochoa (born May 10, 1958) is an American engineer, former astronaut and former director of the Johnson Space Center. In 1993, Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Ochoa became director of the center upon the retirement of the previous director, Michael Coats, on December 31, 2012. She was the first Hispanic director and the second female director of Johnson Space Center.

Ellen Ochoa aboard Space Shuttle Discovery during mission STS-56.





DEATHS


1822 
Paolo Ruffini (September 22, 1765 – May 10, 1822) Italian mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups. He is regarded as the first to make a significant attempt to show that there is no algebraic solution of the general quintic equation (an equation with the variable in one term raised to the fifth power). In 1799 Ruffini published a book on the theory of equations with his claim that quintics could not be solved by radicals, General theory of equations in which it is shown that the algebraic solution of the general equation of degree greater than four is impossible. Ruffini used group theory in his work but he had to invent the subject for himself. He also wrote on probability and the application of probability to evidence in court cases. *TIS




1829 Thomas Young  (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) English physician and physicist who reinforced the wave theory of light with his study of interference of light. As a medical student, he had discovered the how the shape of the eye's lens changes to focus. In 1801, he recognized the cause of astigmatism. Young demonstrated the wave nature of light, polarization of light, interference fringes, and explained the colours seen in thin films such as soap bubbles. He associated wavelength with colour of light, and the eye's perception of any colour as a mixture of red, blue and green. Young's modulus is named after his work with elasticity. He also worked measuring the size of molecules, liquid surface tension. He was also an Egyptologist who helped decipher the Rosetta Stone. The museum in Cairo has another "roseta", the Decree of Canopus, in Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, issued by Ptolemy III Euergetes in -238. It decrees leap years to be included in the calendar. It was not discovered until 1866, too late to assist Young and Champollion in deciphering, but which confirmed their work.






1910 Antoine Joseph Bernard Brunhes (3 July 1867 – 10 May 1910) was a French geophysicist known for his pioneering work in paleomagnetism, in particular, his 1906 discovery of geomagnetic reversal. The current period of normal polarity, Brunhes Chron, and the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal are named for him.




1924 August Gutzmer (2 Feb 1860 in Neu-Roddahn, near Neustadt an der Dosse, Germany -10 May 1924 in Halle, Germany) was a German mathematician who worked on differential equations. *SAU


1941 Diederik Korteweg (31 March 1848 – 10 May 1941) was a Dutch mathematician with wide interests.  He is now best remembered for his work on the Korteweg–de Vries equation, together with Gustav de Vries.  

Korteweg was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for 60 years. He was a member of the Dutch Mathematical Society for 75 years. He was editor of Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde from 1897 to his death in 1941.

An experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station in 2003 (Miscible Fluids in Microgravity) was mounted to prove one of Korteweg's theories.[9]

The asteroid 9685 Korteweg and the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics are named after him.




1989 Hassler Whitney (March 23, 1907 – May 10, 1989) was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, and characteristic classes. *SAU

In 1947 he was elected member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1969 he was awarded the Lester R. Ford Award for the paper in two parts "The mathematics of Physical quantities" (1968a, 1968b). In 1976 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1980 he was elected honorary member of the London Mathematical Society. In 1982, he received the Wolf Prize from the Wolf Foundation, and finally, in 1985, he was awarded the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society. *Wik



2003 Ambrosius Paul Speiser (November 13 1922, in Basel – May 10 2003, in Aarau) was a Swiss engineer and scientist. He led the development of the first Swiss electronic computer.

Speiser studied electrotechnology at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where in 1948 he earned his diploma in communications engineering. In 1949, Eduard Stiefel sent Heinz Rutishauser and Speiser to study in Harvard under Howard H. Aiken and in Princeton under John von Neumann; Rutishauser and Speiser became acquainted with the Harvard Mark III and the IAS machine. In 1950, the Institut für angewandte Mathematik (Institute for Applied Mathematics, founded in 1948) of ETH acquired the Zuse Z4. As there were no other commercially available electronic computers which were suitable for scientific applications aside from the Z4, this led the Swiss to the idea of developing their own computer inspired by the Z4. Under Speiser's technical direction between 1950 and 1955, Switzerland's first electronic calculating machine, ERMETH, originated.

Speiser earned his doctorate and habilitation during the development of ERMETH, but began an industrial career when he joined IBM in 1955. From 1956 to 1966 he was the director of IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon, the only research center of IBM outside of the USA at the time. In 1966 he left IBM to become the director of research for Brown, Boveri & Cie in order to develop the company's research center in Dättwil. He also served as the second president of the International Federation for Information Processing from 1965 to 1968.

In 1962 ETH made Speiser a full professor. For years, he taught one of the first courses in computer science at the ETH. In 1986 ETH honored him with an honorary doctorate for his pioneering work at the frontier of informatics. The Schweizerische Akademie der Technischen Wissenschaften chose Speiser on 1987 as president of its executive committee and upon his resignation in 1993 made him an honorary member. Speiser was also a member of the Schweizerischen Schulrats, member of the board of trustees of the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds, and from 1983 to 1988 president of Vororts (now Economiesuisse); *Wik



2009 Carol Jo Crannell (November 15, 1938 – May 10, 2009) was a solar physicist known for her work on solar flares and on the astrophysical observation of x-rays and gamma rays. She worked for thirty years at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Crannell was born in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Miami University in 1960, and completed her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in 1967, with Robert Hofstadter as her doctoral advisor. She worked at the Goddard Space Flight Center from 1974 until 2004, when she retired.
Crannell also held an adjunct faculty position at Catholic University of America, where her husband, Hall L. Crannell, is an emeritus professor. Her daughter, Annalisa Crannell, is a mathematician at Franklin & Marshall College.
Crannell's doctoral research concerned particle showers. At Goddard, Crannell pushed for x-ray and gamma-ray observations of the sun, and led balloon-mounted experiments to make these observations.
Crannell played an active role in the struggle for equal opportunity for women in physics. She chaired the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics of the American Physical Society, and helped found the CSWP Gazette, the newsletter of the Committee. Through her position at the Catholic University she also helped bring underrepresented students to summer internships at Goddard.
Crannell became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1992, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998. In 1990, Women in Aerospace gave her their Outstanding Achievement Award "for her dedication to expanding women’s opportunities for career advancement and for increasing their visibility through her activities as an aerospace professional".
*Wik

Carol Crannell and ε beta (grandchild)





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


Saturday, 9 May 2026

On This Day in Math - May 9

  

Margarita philosophica of Gregor Reisch *MAA



If you ask a drunkard what number is larger, 2/3 or 3/5, he might not be able to tell you. But if you rephrase the question: What is better, 2 bottles of vodka for 3 people, or 3 bottles of vodka for 5 people, he will tell you right away.
Israel Gelfand (from Love and Math, by Edward Frenkel)



The 129th day of the year; 129 is the smallest number with four representations as a sum of three positive (but not necessarily distinct) squares: 129 = 1+ 8+ 8= 2+ 2+ 11= 2+ 5+ 10= 4+ 7+ 8.

129 is also the sum of the first ten primes.

129 is the smallest sum of distinct seventh powers (17 + 27).

And if you've not spent some time in Western Ky, and perhaps even if you have, you might not guess where the official Banana Capital of the US is. It's in the little town of Fulton, Ky, along the train route from New Orleans to Chicago, and Fulton had the distinction of being the place where Union Fruit company chose to pause the trains bringing fresh bananas along the way to re-ice them for the rest of their journey.At one time over 70% of Bananas shipped into the US came through Fulton. About 13 miles away is the even smaller town of Wingo, formerly called Wingo Station ( because it set along the same New Orleans and Ohio rail line passing through Fulton. And what they have in common other than that, is the reason I mention them today, they are on the ends of Ky Route 129. They are just a pretty spring drive of 40 miles from here in Possum Trot.

"Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here!"  Herbert Morrison broadcasting live over WLS Chicago from NAS Lakehurst New Jersey as he reported on the burning of the Hydrogen filled Zeppelin, The Hindenburg, on May 6, 1937 (that was the 126th day of that year), but it's number was LZ129..  

*Wik





EVENTS


1562 In the evening Don Carlos, son of Phillip II of Spain, and heir to the throne lay dying from a fall on a staircase a month earlier. In hopes of a miracle, the king prayed, and then caused, or allowed, the body of a 15th-Century priest from the village to be brought and laid by his son. Within days the young man recovered, and the grateful father commissioned the royal clockmaker, Juanelo Turriano, to create one of the first human form automatons in Europe, the praying monk. The incredible wind up device, made of wood and iron and 15 inches in height, driven by a key-wound spring,would walk lifelike in a square, nodding his head as his mouth moves in prayer, sometimes beating his chest, and kissing his cross and rosary. The device is now in the Smithsonian, and it still works.
For more about the story read here,  and more pictures of the automaton just search Praying Monk on your favorite search engine. 


1664 Hooke speaks to Royal Society on finding the Giant Red Spot on Jupiter OUHOS Collections ‏@OUHOSCollection

 


1694 Johann Bernoulli, in a letter to Leibniz, introduced the term and the explicit process of “sepera­tio indeterminatarum” or separation of variables for solving differential equations. He published it in Acta eruditorum in November, 1694. [Ince, 531] *VFR In 1691 the inverse problem of tangents led Leibniz to the implicit discovery of the method of separation of variables.

In mathematics, separation of variables is any of several methods for solving ordinary and partial differential equations, in which algebra allows one to rewrite an equation so that each of two variables occurs on a different side of the equation.








1831 Galois party toast will lead to his arrest. Derbyshire describes the events in "Unknown Quantity, a real and imaginary history of Algebra."





1848 “Proficiency in Algebra, the elements of geometry, trigonometry, and surveying, will give you the art of developing truth by the skillful use of the reasoning powers, and, besides, store your mind with a species of knowledge of daily practical utility to a lawyer. ... It is the helm of the mind, stering it over the shortest route from the point of departure to the destination—from cause to effect.” So wrote the American soldier Albert Sidney Johnston (1803–1862) to his son. From William Preston Johnston (the son), The Life of General Albert Sidney Johnston (1878),p. 162, as quoted by Florian Cajori in Mathematics in Liberal Education (1928), p. 103. *VFR 

Johnston was the highest-ranking officer on either side killed during the entire U S Civil War.(  at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862)




1854  There is a "letter from Rankine to Thomson of 9 May 1854 in which he suggests more reasonably that the leading term in the departure from the perfect-gas laws is linear in the density, or (1/V). This turned out to be so .."  (JAMES JOULE, WILLIAM THOMSON AND THE CONCEPT OF A PERFECT GAS by J. S. ROWLINSON)


W J M Rankine




1914 Think of all the work that mothers do in raising their children. Mothers need to be celebrated! President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed May 9, 1914, the first Mother's Day. He asked Americans on that day to give a public "thank you" to their mothers and all mothers.
Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia wanted to remember her own mother along with all mothers. Anna’s mother had been very active in working to improve the health of people in her community. Jarvis’s mother also organized a Mother’s Friendship event in her community to bring confederate and union soldiers together for a peaceful celebration. Many other women such as Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Elizabeth Smith also fought for peace and encouraged mothers to speak out. Anna Jarvis convinced her mother’s church to celebrate Mother’s Day on the anniversary of her mother’s death, and campaigned for a national day honoring mothers. Because of Jarvis’s hard work, Woodrow Wilson chose that date for the national holiday. (Library of Congress web site) In 2025 it's May 11... Happy Birthday to Mom's everywhere.

On May 10, 1908, three years after her mother's death, Jarvis held a memorial ceremony to honor her mother and all mothers at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, today the International Mother's Day Shrine, in Grafton, West Virginia, marking the first official observance of Mother's Day.





1926 Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to fly over the North Pole. *TIS


1972 100 high school students took the first U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad. The purpose was to discover secondary school students with superior mathematical talent. One of the five problems on the exam was: “A random number selector can only select one of the nine integers 1, 2,..., 9, and it makes these selections with equal probability. Determine the probability that after n selections (for n larger than 1), the product of the n numbers selected will be divisible by 10.” For the winners, the other problems, and the solutions, see AMM 80 (1973), pp 276–281. *VFR
 


2013 Surfs Up, Sun's Not, in Hawaii, at least for a moment. Solar Eclipse in Honolulu *Carey Johnson ‏@TheTelescopeGuy

2016 It happens only a little more than once a decade – and the next chance to see it is TODAY!. Throughout the U.S., sky watchers can watch Mercury pass between Earth and the sun in a rare astronomical event known as a planetary transit. Mercury will appear as a tiny black dot as it glides in front of the sun’s blazing disk over a period of seven and a half hours. Three NASA satellites will be providing images of the transit and one of them will have a near-live feed. *NASA




BIRTHS


1746  Gaspard Monge, (9 May 1746 – 28 July 1818) noted geometer, son of a peddler and knife grinder   at Beaune, France. Today there is a statue of him in his home town. (I stumbled across it while visiting vineyards).*VFR One of the founders of descriptive geometry (the mathematics of projecting solid figures onto a plane, upon which modern engineering drawing is based) and the application of the techniques of analysis to the theory of curvature. The latter ultimately led to the revolutionary work of Georg Riemann on geometry and curvature. He became a close friend of Napoleon and was appointed minister for the navy (1792-93), but was stripped of all honours on the restoration of the Bourbons. He died in poverty. *TIS
As an active Jacobin, he was acting head of the government on the day Louis XVI was executed.  He was also Minister of the Navy. He was in official disfavor when he died and had been expelled from the Academy in 1816 (along with Lazare Carnot), but his students erected a monument with a bust. MONGE was buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise (Mausoleum at right below) but in 1989, he was translated to the Panthéon.




1785 James Pollard Espy (9 May 1785, 24 Jan 1860) American meteorologist who was one of the first to collect meteorological observations by telegraph. He gave apparently the first essentially correct explanation of the thermodynamics of cloud formation and growth. Every great atmospheric disturbance begins with a rising mass of heated, thus less dense air. While rising, the air mass dilates and cools. Then, as water vapor precipitates as clouds, latent heat is liberated so the dilation and rising continues until the moisture of the air forming the upward current is practically exhausted. The heavier air flows in beneath, and, finding a diminished pressure above it, rushes upward with constantly increasing violence. Water vapour precipitated during this atmospheric disturbance results in heavy rains.*TIS





1808 John Scott Russell (9 May 1808, Parkhead, Glasgow – 8 June 1882, Ventnor, Isle of Wight)  British civil engineer best known for researches in ship design. He designed the first seagoing battleship built entirely of iron. He was the first to record an observation of a soliton, while conducting experiments to determine the most efficient design for canal boats. In Aug 1834, he observed what he called the "Wave of Translation," a solitary wave formed in the narrow channel of a canal which continues ahead after a canal boat stops. [This is now recognised as a fundamental ingredient in the theory of 'solitons', applicable to a wide class of nonlinear partial differential equations.] He also made the first experimental observation of the "Doppler shift" of sound frequency as a train passes (1848). He designed (with Brunel) the Great Eastern and built it; he designed the Vienna Rotunda and helped to design Britain's first armored warship, the Warrior. *TIS



1876 Gilbert Ames Bliss (9 May 1876, Chicago – 8 May 1951, Harvey, Illinois) did important work in the calculus of variations. Throughout his career at Chicago he stressed the importance of a strong union between teaching and research. *VFR  This is another one who died within a week of their birthday (he died on May 8). 





1898 Arend Heyting 
(May 9, 1898 – July 9, 1980) is important in the development of intuitionistic logic and algebra.He was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a footing where it could become part of mathematical logic. Heyting gave the first formal development of intuitionistic logic in order to codify Brouwer's way of doing mathematics. The inclusion of Brouwer's name in the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation is largely honorific, as Brouwer was opposed in principle to any formalisation of intuitionistic logic (and went as far as calling Heyting's work a "sterile exercise").   *Wik



Albert Geoffrey Howson (9 May, 1931 – 1 November 2022) was a British mathematician and educationist.

He started to work as algebraist and in 1954 published the Howson property of groups and proved it for some types of groups. Later he devoted himself to the mathematics education and participated in reforms of mathematics education in the Great Britain and internationally. He was the editor-in-chief and chairman of Trustees of the School Mathematics Project in Great Britain and was involved in many other national and international projects. He worked at University of Southampton as head of the Department of Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Mathematical Studies and served as president of the Mathematical Association of Great Britain, and two terms as Secretary of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction.

Howson died on 1 November 2022, aged 91.



1936 Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirillov (May 9,1936) is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, renowned for his works in the fields of representation theory, topological groups and Lie groups. In particular he introduced the orbit method into representation theory.

Kirillov studied at Moscow State University where he was a student of Israel Gelfand. His Ph.D. (kandidat) dissertation Unitary representations of nilpotent Lie groups 1962 was so successful that he was awarded the much higher degree of Doctor of Science instead. At the time he was the youngest Doctor of Science in the Soviet Union. He worked at the Moscow State University until 1994 when he became the Francis J. Carey Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania.
During his school years, Kirillov was a winner of many mathematics competitions, and he is still an active organizer of Russian mathematical contests. Kirillov is an author of many popular school-oriented books and articles.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Kirillov's son, Alexander Kirillov, Jr., is also a mathematician, working on the representation theory of Lie groups at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. *Wik





1950 Esteban Terrades i Illa (15 September 1883;Barcelona,- 9 May 1950,Madrid,) was a Spanish mathematician, scientist and engineer. He researched and taught widely in the fields of mathematics and the physical sciences, working not only in his native Catalonia, but also in the rest of Spain and in South America. He was also active as a consultant in the Spanish aeronautics, electric power, telephone and railway industries. *Wik



1965  Karen Ellen Smith (May 9, 1965,- ) is an American mathematician who works on commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. She is the Keeler Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. She won the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for her development of tight closure methods in commutative algebra and especially for her application of these methods in algebraic geometry.

She completed her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University before earning her PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1993. Currently she is the Keeler Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. In addition to being a researcher in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, Smith with others wrote the textbook An Invitation to Algebraic Geometry.

In 2001 Smith won the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for her development of tight closure methods, introduced by Hochster and Huneke, in commutative algebra and her application of these methods in algebraic geometry*Wik





DEATHS



1525 Gregor Reisch (born at Balingen in Württemberg, about 1467; died at Freiburg, Baden, 9 May 1525) was a German Carthusian humanist writer. He is best known for his Margarita philosophica, which first appeared at Freiburg in 1503. It is an encyclopedia of knowledge intended as a text-book for youthful students, and contains in twelve books Latin grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, physics, natural history, physiology, psychology, and ethics. The usefulness of the work was increased by numerous woodcuts and a full index. *Wik
Image of Calculating-Table by Gregor Reisch: Margarita Philosophica, 1503. The woodcut shows Arithmetica instructing an algorist and an abacist (inaccurately represented as Boethius and Pythagoras). There was keen competition between the two from the introduction of the Algebra into Europe in the 12th century until its triumph in the 16th.


1778  Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac,(6 December 1778 – 9 May 1850)) a French chemist, is well known to modern chemists for two laws, one relating the volume of a gas to its temperature (volume increases linearly with temperature), and the second, called the law of combining volumes, which states that when two gases combine, their volumes are in the ratios of small whole numbers. This latter law, announced in 1808, demonstrated, for example, that when one combines hydrogen and oxygen to form water, it takes exactly two volumes of hydrogen for every one volume of oxygen. The law of combining volumes could be used to support John Dalton's atomic theory, published the very same year, for if water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, then one might well expect that you would need two volumes of hydrogen for every one of oxygen (assuming that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of particles, and Amadeo Avogadro would offer this up as his own law, Avogadro's hypothesis, in 1811).

For the non-chemist, Gay-Lussac's career as a balloonist might be of more interest. With fellow chemist Jean-Baptiste Biot, Gay-Lussac made a balloon ascent of some 4 miles in 1804, collecting atmospheric samples all the way, and the next year he made a solo ascent and went even higher, setting an altitude record of some 23,000 feet that would stand for another 60 years. He also determined that the composition of the atmosphere does not change with altitude.

In 1867, Louis Figuier published an image of the Biot/Gay-Lussac ascent that has proved quite enduring in ballooning lore ; the illustration has been much copied, even appearing on a tea card . Gay-Lussac has also been featured on a French postage stamp . He was buried in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris . *Linda Hall Org





1808 Reverend Robert Main (July 12, 1808 – May 9, 1878) English astronomer.

Born in Kent, the eldest son of Thomas Main, Robert Main attended school in Portsea before studying mathematics at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1834. He served for twenty-five years (1835-60) as First Assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and published numerous articles, particularly on stellar and planetary motion, stellar parallax, and the dimensions and shapes of the planets. From 1841 to 1861 he was successively an honorary secretary, a vice-president, and President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1858 was awarded the Society's Gold Medal. In 1860 he became director of Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford University after the death of Manuel Johnson, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. *Today in Astronomy





1931 Albert Abraham Michelson (December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) German-born American physicist who accurately measured the speed of light and received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations" he carried out with them. He designed the highly accurate Michelson interferometer and used it to establish the speed of light as a fundamental constant. With Edward Morley, he also used it in an attempt to measure the velocity of the earth through the ether (1887). The experiment yielded null results that eventually led Einstein to his theory of relativity. He measured the standard meter bar in Paris to be 1,553,163.5 wavelengths of the red cadmium line (1892-3). *TIS  There is a marker near the place where the experiment was done.  It says, "Near this spot, in July 1887, Dr. Albert A. Michelson of Case and Dr. Edward W. Morley of Western Reserve University conducted the world-famous Michelson-Morley experiment, one of the outstanding scientific achievements of the 19th century and a cornerstone of modern physics. In commemoration, this tablet has been set in stone by both colleges on December 19, 1952, the 100th anniversary of Dr. Michelson's birth.



2021  Marion Walter (July 30, 1928 – May 9, 2021) was an internationally-known mathematics educator and professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. 

Marion Ilse Walter was born in Berlin and escaped the Nazis on the Kindertransport to England. She emigrated to the United States in 1948 and after earning her doctorate, founded the Mathematics Department at Simmons College. She published over 40 journal articles, several children's books, and the popular book The Art of Problem Posing.

There is a theorem named after her, called Marion Walter's Theorem or just Marion's Theorem as it is affectionately known.

This theorem, first stated by Walter in 1994, is the following:

Let  ABC be any triangle. Trisect each side, so that AB has C1 and C2  as the two trisection points and similarly for the other two sides. Draw the lines A  A1,  A A2, and similarly lines B B1 , B B2 , C C1, C C2.

These lines define an hexagonal region in the middle of triangleABC. Then the area of the hexagonal region is 1/10 the area of ABC.






2022 John Henry Coates, FRS (26 January 1945 – 9 May 2022) is a mathematician who held (1986-2012) the position of Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1985, and was President of the London Mathematical Society from 1988 to 1990. The latter organisation awarded him the Senior Whitehead Prize in 1997, for "his fundamental research in number theory and for his many contributions to mathematical life both in the UK and internationally".
Since 1986 Coates has worked in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) of the University of Cambridge. In the last ten years he has focused on the study of various aspects of non-commutative Iwasawa theory, for instance, the study of the arithmetic of elliptic curves in nonabelian infinite extensions.*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