On This Day in Math - December 27

  

Jacob Bernoulli's tomb marker

At ubi materia, ibi Geometria.
Where there is matter, there is geometry.

~Johannes Kepler


The 361st day of the year, 2³⁶¹ is an apocalyptic number, it contains 666. 2³⁶¹=4697085165547666455778961193578674054751365097816639741414581943064418050229216886927397996769537406063869952 That's 109 digits.

One of Ramanujan's many approximations of pi was  (9²+ (19²/22))^1/4, and 361 = 19²

and as 361 is the last year day that is a perfect square, important to point out for students that all perfect squares are also the sum of consecutive triangular numbers, 361= 171 + 190 (The visual of this is a must see for students)

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EVENTS
1612 Galileo observed Neptune, but did not recognize it as a planet. Galileo's drawings show that he first observed Neptune on December 28, 1612, and again on January 27, 1613. On both occasions, Galileo mistook Neptune for a fixed star when it appeared very close—in conjunction—to Jupiter in the night sky; hence, he is not credited with Neptune's discovery. (The official discovery is usually cited as September 23, 1846, Neptune was discovered within 1° of where Le Verrier had predicted it to be.) During the period of his first observation in December 1612, Neptune was stationary in the sky because it had just turned retrograde that very day. This apparent backward motion is created when the orbit of the Earth takes it past an outer planet. Since Neptune was only beginning its yearly retrograde cycle, the motion of the planet was far too slight to be detected with Galileo's small telescope.*Wik 

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On this day in 1725, Christian Goldbach was the recording secretary at the opening session of the St Petersburg Academy. The form of the Academy was imported ready-made from the Berlin model proposed to Peter the Great by Leibniz several years earlier.

The Academy started as the The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences and was based in St Petersburg. The name varied over the years, becoming The Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts 1747-1803), The Imperial Academy of Sciences (1803- 1836), and finally, The Imperial Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences (from 1836 and until the end of the empire in 1917). Following the Revolution in 1917 it was renamed the Russian Academy of Sciences. It kept this name only until 1925 when it became the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1934 it moved from Leningrad (which is what St Petersburg had been renamed) to Moscow. In 1991 its name of the Russian Academy of Sciences was reinstated.*SAU

Some of the initial Academy members were Daniel and Nicolaus Bernoulli, Christian Goldbach, Johann Duvernoy, Christian Gross, and Gerhard Müller. Euler arrived in St. Petersburg in 1727 to take up a post in physiology, a field in which he had little experience. Before long, though, he was transferred to other areas of study; he was made full Professor of Physics in 1731, and Professor of Mathematics in 1733. Euler also took on another role as a member of the Academy's Geography and Cartography department.*Euler Archive

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In 1831, Charles Darwin set sail from Plymouth harbour on his voyage of scientific discovery aboard the HMS Beagle, a British Navy ship. The Captain Robert FitzRoy was sailing to the southern coast of South America in order to complete a government survey. Darwin had an unpaid position as the ship's naturalist, at age 22, just out of university. Originally planned to be at sea for two years, the voyage lasted five years, making stops in Brazil, the Galapagos Islands, and New Zealand. From the observations he made and the specimens he collected on that voyage, Darwin developed his theory of biological evolution through natural selection, which he published 28 years after the Beagle left Plymouth. Darwin laid the foundation of modern evolutionary theory. *TIS

HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy, one of more than 100 ships of this class. The vessel, constructed at a cost of £7,803, was launched on 11 May 1820 from the Woolwich Dockyard on the River Thames. Wikipedia

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In 1956, the formerly believed "law" of conservation of parity was disproved in the first successful results from an experiment conducted by Madame Chien-Shiung Wu at Columbia University on the beta-decay of cobalt-60. It had been suggested in a paper published by Lee and Yang on 1 Oct 1956. There had been problems to overcome working with the cobalt sample and detectors in a vacuum at a working temperature of one-hundredth of a kelvin. Wu's team repeated the experiment, doing maintenance on the apparatus as necessary, until on 9 Jan 1957 further measurements confirmed the initial results. Leon Lederman performed an independent test of parity with Columbia's cyclotron. They held a press conference on 15 Jan 1957.*TIS

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1995  France concludes a series of nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific ( Moruroa and Fangataufa Atoll test site).  In a controversial move, French President Jacques Chirac had lifted a moratorium on testing. Most countries test weapons with computer simulations instead of actual bomb drops, but France claimed that tests that had been suspended several years earlier left the country without sufficient data to conduct future tests on computers.

Tahitians, as well as much of the international community, were outraged. Many expected the tests to harm the underwater geography and sea life of the atoll, as well as pose health risks to Tahitians. A French map from 1980 shows that testing had cracked the atolls in the past, destroyed coral reefs, and altered land plates. Harmful radioactive material had also been shown to spread via wind and rain. Some also saw France’s decision as a dangerous new step in nuclear proliferation in the West.

Both Tahitians and activists around the world responded strongly to France’s testing announcement. Activists in Tahiti were organizing a response while Greenpeace, an international environmental organization, sent a ship to Tahiti to protest the testing.

BIRTHS
1571 Johannes Kepler (27 Dec 1571; 15 Nov 1630) German astronomer who formulated three major laws of planetary motion which enabled Isaac Newton to devise the law of gravitation. Working from the carefully measured positions of the planets recorded by Tycho Brahe, Kepler mathematically deduced three relationships from the data: (1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus; (2) the radius vector sweeps out equal areas in equal times; and (3) for two planets the squares of their periods are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. Kepler suggested that the tides were caused by the attraction of the moon. He believed that the universe was governed by mathematical rules, but recognized the importance of experimental verification.*TIS

Fig. 1: Illustration of Kepler's laws with two planetary orbits.

1. The orbits are ellipses, with foci F₁ and F₂ for Planet 1, and F₁ and F₃ for Planet 2. The Sun is at F₁.
2. The shaded areas A₁ and A₂ are equal, and are swept out in equal times by Planet 1's orbit.
3. The ratio of Planet 1's orbit time to Planet 2's is .

*Wik

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1654 Jacob Jacques Bernoulli (27 Dec 1654; 16 Aug 1705) was a Swiss mathematician and astronomer who was one of the first to fully utilize differential calculus and introduced the term integral in integral calculus. Jacob Bernoulli's first important contributions were a pamphlet on the parallels of logic and algebra (1685), work on probability in 1685 and geometry in 1687. His geometry result gave a construction to divide any triangle into four equal parts with two perpendicular lines. By 1689 he had published important work on infinite series and published his law of large numbers in probability theory. He published five treatises on infinite series (1682 - 1704). Jacob was intrigued by the logarithmic spiral and requested it be carved on his tombstone. He was the first of the Bernoulli family of mathematicians. *TIS 

He was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus, which he made numerous contributions to; along with his brother Johann, he was one of the founders of the calculus of variations. He also discovered the fundamental mathematical constant e. However, his most important contribution was in the field of probability, where he derived the first version of the law of large numbers in his work Ars Conjectandi.*Wik

(see more about the family of Bernoulli's at the Renaissance Mathematicus )

Even as the finite encloses an infinite series

And in the unlimited limits appear,

So the soul of immensity dwells in minutia

And in the narrowest limits no limit in here.

What joy to discern the minute in infinity!

The vast to perceive in the small, what divinity!

I found an interesting anecdote related to teaching and learning at the MAA website by Paul Bedard (Saint Clair County Community College)

"To learn more about mathematics than was possible at the University, Jakob traveled to Geneva.  However, before he found a tutor, he became one.  He entered the employ of the Waldkirch family in 1676 as tutor to the young, blind Elizabeth Waldkirch.  His task was to help her learn to read and write – not a common accomplishment for the blind at that time.  He continued in this occupation until 1678.  M.B.W. Tent suggested, in her fictionalized account of the lives of Euler and the Bernoullis,  that the elder Waldkirch wanted someone trained in mathematics, since he had learned that the mathematician Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) had been involved in teaching literacy to the blind.  It is worth noting that it is still true today that many professions seek mathematically trained candidates or use mathematics tests for eligibility, not because the job requires the specific skills involved, but because the assumption is that minds that can grasp mathematics are disciplined and sharp.  This is a fact which the author shares with his students regularly."

"What skills as a teacher might Jakob Bernoulli have gained from this experience?  There is a certain poetry in the idea that the man who would bring light to so much that was dark in mathematics began his teaching career by alleviating the disadvantages of physical blindness.  If Tent was correct that he obtained this opportunity due to being a mathematician, then there is a second level of unexpected appropriateness here. "

"The early tutoring experiences of Jakob Bernoulli suggested to the author an at-home activity to assign our students.  Rather than merely requiring the students to solve problems, ask them to find volunteers and teach the volunteers how to solve the problems.  Each student will write a brief log entry of how the process goes, what explanations worked or failed, and how her “student” responded.  Even if the person “tutored” in this way is unprepared for this level of mathematics, his response to it may be instructive for, or resonate with, our students."

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1773 Sir George Cayley (27 Dec 1773; 15 Dec 1857)(6th Baronet ) English aeronautical pioneer who built the first successful man-carrying glider (1853). He made extensive anatomical and functional studies of bird flight. By measuring bird and human muscle masses, he realized it would be impossible for humans to strap on a pair of wings and take to the air. His further studies in the principles of lift, drag and thrust founded the science of aerodynamics from which he discovered stabilizing flying craft required both vertical and horizontal tail rudders, that concave wings produced more lift than flat surfaces and that swept-back wings provided greater stability. Cayley also invented the caterpillar tractor (1825), automatic railroad crossing signals, self-righting lifeboats, and an expansion-air (hot-air) engine.
*TIS (He was a distant cousin of the father of mathematician Arthur Cayley)

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1915 Jacob Lionel Bakst Cooper (27 December 1915, Beaufort West, Cape Province, South Africa, 8 August 1979, London, England) was a South African mathematician who worked in operator theory, transform theory, thermodynamics, functional analysis and differential equations.*Wik

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DEATHS
1771 Henri Pitot (3 May 1695, 27 Dec 1771) French hydraulic engineer who invented the Pitot tube (1732), an instrument to measure flow velocity either in liquids or gases. With subsequent improvements by Henri Darcy, its modern form is used to determine the airspeed of aircraft. Although originally a trained mathematician and astronomer, he became involved with an investigation of the velocity of flowing water at different depths, for which purpose he first created the Pitot tube. He disproved the prevailing belief that the velocity of flowing water increased with depth. Pitot became an engineer in charge of maintenance and construction of canals, bridges, drainage projects, and is particularly remembered for his kilometer-long Roman-arched Saint-Clément Aqueduct (1772) at Montpellier, France. *TIS

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1930 Gyula Farkas (28 March 1847 in Sárosd, Fejér County, Hungary - 27 Dec 1930 in Pestszentlorinc, Hungary) He is remembered for Farkas theorem which is used in linear programming and also for his work on linear inequalities. In 1881 Gyula Farkas published a paper on Farkas Bolyai's iterative solution to the trinomial equation, making a careful study of the convergence of the algorithm. In a paper published three years later, Farkas examined the convergence of more general iterative methods. He also made major contributions to applied mathematics and physics, particularly in the areas of mechanical equilibrium, thermodynamics, and electrodynamics.*SAU

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1952 Mary Engle Pennington (October 8, 1872 – December 27, 1952) was an American bacteriological chemist, food scientist and refrigeration engineer. She was a pioneer in the preservation, handling, storage and transportation of perishable foods and the first female lab chief at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She was awarded 5 patents, received the Notable Service Medal from President Herbert Hoover and the Garvin-Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society. She is an inductee of the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, the National Women's Hall of Fame and the ASHRAE Hall of Fame.

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1973 Raymond Woodard Brink (4 Jan 1890 in Newark, New Jersey, USA - 27 Dec 1973 in La Jolla, California, USA) was an American mathematician who studied at Kansas State University, Harvard and Paris. He taught at the University of Minnesota though he spent a year in Edinburgh in 1919. He worked on the convergence of series. *SAU

He also authored numerous math textbooks. He served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1941–42.*Wik

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1992 Alfred Hoblitzelle Clifford (July 11, 1908 – December 27, 1992) was an American mathematician who is known for Clifford theory and for his work on semigroups. The Alfred H. Clifford Mathematics Research Library at Tulane University is named after him.*Wik

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1995 Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko (January 1, 1912 - December 27, 1995) was a Soviet mathematician and a student of Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov. He was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), Russia, and died in Moscow. He is perhaps best known for his work with Kolmogorov, and his contributions to the study of probability theory. Gnedenko was appointed as Head of the Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry Section of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1949, and also became Director of the Kiev Institute of Mathematics in the same year.*Wik

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1996 Sister Mary Celine Fasenmyer, R.S.M., (October 4, 1906, Crown, Pennsylvania – December 27, 1996, Erie, Pennsylvania) was a mathematician. She is most noted for her work on hypergeometric functions and linear algebra.*Wik

For ten years after her graduation she taught and studied at Mercyhurst College in Erie, where she joined the Sisters of Mercy. She pursued her mathematical studies in Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan, obtaining her doctorate in 1946 under the direction of Earl Rainville, with a dissertation entitled Some Generalized Hypergeometric Polynomials.

After earning her Ph.D., Fasenmyer published two papers which expanded on her doctorate work. These would be further elaborated by Doron Zeilberger and Herbert Wilf into "WZ theory", which allowed computerized proof of many combinatorial identities. After this, she returned to Mercyhurst to teach and did not engage in further research.

Fasenmyer is most remembered for the method that bears her name, first described in her Ph.D. thesis concerning recurrence relations in hypergeometric series.The thesis demonstrated a purely algorithmic method to find recurrence relations satisfied by sums of terms of a hypergeometric polynomial, and requires only the series expansions of the polynomial. The beauty of her method is that it lends itself readily to computer automation. The work of Wilf and Zeilberger generalized the algorithm and established its correctness.

The hypergeometric polynomials she studied are called Sister Celine's polynomials.

*Wik

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2006 Peter Ladislaw Hammer (December 23, 1936, Timișoara – December 27, 2006, Princeton, New Jersey) was an American mathematician native to Romania. He contributed to the fields of operations research and applied discrete mathematics through the study of pseudo-Boolean functions and their connections to graph theory and data mining.

 He did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Bucharest, earning a diploma in 1958 and a doctorate in 1965 under the supervision of Grigore Moisil. For a while in the 1960s he published under the name of Petru L. Ivănescu. In 1967, he and his wife (Anca Ivănescu) escaped Romania and defected to Israel. Hammer taught at the Technion from 1967 to 1969, then moved to Canada at McGill University in Montreal from 1969 to 1972, at the University of Waterloo from 1972 to 1983, and finally at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey for the remainder of his career. He was killed in a car accident on December 27, 2006.

Hammer founded the Rutgers University Center for Operations Research, and created and edited the journals Discrete Mathematics, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Discrete Optimization, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Annals of Operations Research, and SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications

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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

On This Day in Math - December 26

  

A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.
~Charles Babbage


The 360th day of the year; Bryant Tuckerman found the Mersenne prime M19937 (which has 6000 digits) using an IBM360. *Prime Curios

360 is also the number of degrees in a full circle, and there is a (rather new) word for two angles that sum to 360 degrees.  They are called "explementary" .

360  also figures in another "almost integer, Fib(360)/Fib (216) is approx.  1242282009792667284144565908481.99999999999999999999999999999...

Students, Compare to Fib(5k)/Fib(2k),,,  

360 is a highly composite number, it has 24 divisors, more than any other number of the year, in fact any number that is below twice its size.

It is the smallest number that is divisible by nine of the ten numbers 1-10 (not divisible by 7) What is next, students?

The sum of the digits of the 360th Fibonacci number is 360. It is the 13th year day for which the digits of the nth Fibonacci number sum to n.

There are 360 possible rook moves on a 6x6 chess board.*Derek Orr

360 is centered on the 360th digit of pi (Also from Derek)[However 360 does occur once earlier centered at position 286.]

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EVENTS1638  Fermat, in a letter to Marin Mersenne, stated that he had a method of solving any questions on aliquot parts. Frenicle would respond through Mersenne by challenging Fermat to find a perfect number of 20 or 21 digits, under the then common belief that a perfect number existed between any two consecutive powers of ten.  Fermat's answer, in March was to say that there are none.  *L E Dickson, History of the Theory of Numbers

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1759  Two Russian scientists, working to mix snow and acid, accidentally froze the "quicksilver in their thermometer, and reported the first mention of solid mercury.  They were Mikhail Lomonosov and colleague Joseph Adam Braun.*The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean  

Curiously unsung in the West, Lomonosov broke ground in physics, chemistry, and astronomy; won acclaim as a poet and historian; and was a key figure of the Russian Enlightenment.

Born to a peasant fisherman north of Arcangel, at 19 he made his way to Moscow and began his studies hiding his low born status.  

He is perhaps best known for being the first person to experimentally confirm the law of conservation of matter. That metals gain weight when heated—now a well-known consequence of oxidation—confounded British chemist Robert Boyle, who had famously observed the effect in 1673. The result seemed to implicate that heat itself was a kind of matter. In 1756 Lomonosov disproved that notion by demonstrating that when lead plates are heated inside an airtight vessel, the collective weight of the vessel and its contents stays constant. In a subsequent letter to Euler, he framed the result in terms of a broad philosophy of conservation:

All changes that we encounter in nature proceed so that . . . however much matter is added to any body, as much is taken away from another . . . since this is the general law of nature, it is also found in the rules of motion: a body loses as much motion as it gives to another body.  

*Physics Today

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 1837 Charles Babbage completed his “Calculating Engine” manuscript. *VFR

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1843 John Graves write to William Rowan Hamilton that he has invented an eight-dimension normed division algebra he called "Octaves" Within a few months, Hamilton would realize that the octonions were not associative. This would lead to the first use of the term "associative" by Hamilton in 1844. (Except for matrices, which were not generally considered as "numbers", there were no common non-associative systems at that time) *Joan Baez Rankin Lecture of September 17, 2008 Glascow
The complete Volume Two of the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy were released in 1844, but the paper had been read on November 13, 1843; over a full month before Grave's letter. Hamilton created the phrase in explaining that although the Quaternions maintained the distributive property, "yet the commutative character is lost," and then adds, "another important property of the old multiplication is preserved ... which may be called the associative character of the operation."

Octonion multiplication on a Fano Plane

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1864 The official seal of MIT was adopted on December 26, 1864. The craftsman at the anvil and the scholar with a book on the seal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology embody the educational philosophy of William Barton Rogers and other incorporators of MIT as stated in their 1860 proposal Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology. *MIT History

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1898 Radium discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie. *VFR Actually, it seems this was the date of their announcement of the discovery(which must have occurred a few days earlier. They created the name radium for their element. This was their second discovery in the first year of her research on her thesis. They had also discovered Polonium earlier in the year.

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 In 1906, the world's first full-length feature film, the 70-min Story of the Kelly Gang was presented in the Town Hall at Melbourne, Australia, where it had been filmed at a cost of £450. It preceded D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation by nine years. The subject of the Australian movie was Ned Kelly, a bandit who lived 1855 to 1880. The film toured through Australia for over 20 years, and abroad in New Zealand and Britain. Since some people, including politicians and police viewed the content of the film as glorifying the criminals, the movie was banned (1907) in Benalla and Wangaratta and also in Victoria (1912). Only fragments totalling about 10 minutes of the original nitrate film have survived to the present.*TIS

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1951 Kurt Godel delivered the Gibbs Lecture, “Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and their Philosophical Implications,” to the annual AMS meeting at Brown University. *VFR

The Gibbs lecture can indeed be found in Kurt Gödel, Collected Works, Volume III, Unpublished essays and lectures, edited by Feferman et al., 1995.

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1982 TIME Names a Non-Human “Man of the Year”
TIME magazine's editors selected the Personal Computer for “Machine of the Year,” in lieu of their well-known “Man of the Year” award. The computer beat out U.S. President Ronald Reagan, U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Prime Minister of Israel​, Menachem Begin. The planet Earth became the second non-human recipient for the award in 1988. The awards have been given since 1927. The magazine's essay reported that in 1982, 80% of Americans expected that "in the fairly near future, home computers will be as commonplace as television sets or dishwashers.” In 1980, 724,000 personal computers were sold in the United States, according to Time. The following year, that number doubled to 1.4 million. *CHM

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1992  6141 Durda, provisional designation 1992 YC3 is a stony Hungaria asteroid, classified as slow rotator and Mars-crosser from the innermost region of the asteroid belt, approximately 3.2 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 26 December 1992, by Spacewatch at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, United States. 

Dan is a principal scientist in the Department of Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder Colorado. He has more than 20 years experience researching the collisional and dynamical evolution of main-belt and near-Earth asteroids, Vulcanoids, Kuiper belt comets, and interplanetary dust. Dan is an active pilot, with time logged in over a dozen types of aircraft including the F/A-18 Hornet and the F-104 Starfighter, and was a 2004 NASA astronaut selection finalist. He is also a Board Member of the B612 Foundation for research into near-earth asteroids.  

 Daniel Durda is also an artist of astronomical paintings. In 2015, he was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal for "communicating the wonder of planetary science through visual artistry".

Not to be overlooked, Dan was my student in my early years of teaching at Standish Sterling HS in Michigan.  He was an outstanding student, and made me his fan for life.

I have a poster of the Hale-Bopp image in my Dining Room in the Michigan House.

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2017 On the day after Christmas in the Germantown Church of Christ, in a suburb just Southeast of Memphis, a miracle, of sorts, happened. A computer began running a program that had been installed years before by a 20 year Deacon of the Church, John Pace, discovered the largest known prime number. The new "largest" prime was 23,249,425 digits long. The number is one less than the product of 77,232,917 twos multiplied together, and thus has the name M77232917. The computer then did one thing it was programmed to do; it forwarded the number to the Gimps (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) Project home computer. It failed to do the second thing it was supposed to do, notify the deacon that his computer had succeeded in finding a candidate for the largest known Mersenne Prime. He had to learn the news from a congratulatory email from the founder of the GIMPS project. The public was informed of the new largest prime on Jan 3 of 2018.  *NY TIMES

Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years. 

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BIRTHS1532 Wilhelm Xylander (born Wilhelm Holtzman, graecized to Xylander) (December 26, 1532 – February 10, 1576) was a German classical scholar and humanist.
Xylander was the author of a number of important works. He translated the first six books of Euclid into German with notes, the Arithmetica of Diophantus, and the De quattuor mathematicis scientiis of Michael Psellus into Latin. *Wik

Engraving from Bibliotheca chalcographica

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1780 Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville (26 Dec 1780 in Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, Scotland - 29 Nov 1872 in Naples, Italy) Somerville wrote many works which influenced Maxwell. Her discussion of a hypothetical planet perturbing Uranus led Adams to his investigation. Somerville College in Oxford was named after her.*SAU   

She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Page 157 from Mechanism of the Heavens, Somerville discusses the law of universal gravity and Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

 *Wik

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1791 Charles Babbage born. *VFR (26 Dec 1791; 18 Oct 1871) English mathematician and pioneer of mechanical computation, which he pursued to eliminate inaccuracies in mathematical tables. By 1822, he had a small calculating machine able to compute squares. He produced prototypes of portions of a larger Difference Engine. (Georg and Edvard Schuetz later constructed the first working devices to the same design which were successful in limited applications.) In 1833 he began his programmable Analytical Machine, a forerunner of modern computers. His other inventions include the cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, heliograph opthalmoscope (an instrument for inspecting the retina and other parts of the eye).

. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking.*TIS

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1861 Frederick Engle born in Germany. He became the closest student of the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie. Engle was also the first to translate Lobachevsky’s work into a Western language (German). *VFR

With Paul Stäckel he wrote a history of non-Euclidean geometry (Theorie der Parallellinien von Euklid bis auf Gauss, 1895). With his former student Karl Faber, he wrote a book on the theory of partial differential equations of the first order using methods of Lie group theory. In 1910 Engel was the president of the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung.

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1900 Antoni Zygmund (26 Dec 1900; 30 May 1992) Polish-born mathematician who created a major analysis research centre at Chicago, and recognized in 1986 for this with the National Medal for Science. In 1940, he escaped with his wife and son from German controlled Poland to the USA. He did much work in harmonic analysis, a statistical method for determining the amplitude and period of certain harmonic or wave components in a set of data with the aid of Fourier series. Such technique can be applied in various fields of science and technology, including natural phenomena such as sea tides. He also did major work in Fourier analysis and its application to partial differential equations. Zygmund's book Trigonometric Series (1935) is a classic, definitive work on the subject*TIS

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1903 Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet (26 Dec 1903 in St. Stephen's-by-Saltash, Cornwall, England - 10 Jan 1984 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England) Bosanquet wrote many papers on the convergence and summability of Fourier series. He also wrote on the convergence and summability of Dirichlet series and studied specific kinds of summability such as summability factors for Cesàro means. His later work on integrals include two major papers on the Laplace-Stieltjes integral published in 1953 and 1961. Other topics he studied included inequalities, mean-value theorems, Tauberian theorems, and convexity theorems. *SAU

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1937 John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics, notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
Conway is currently Professor of Mathematics and John Von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. He studied at Cambridge, where he started research under Harold Davenport. He received the Berwick Prize (1971), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1981), was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize (LMS) (1987), won the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000) of the American Mathematical Society. He has an Erdős number of one.*Wik Conway is known for his sense of humor, and the last proof in his "On Numbers and Games" is this:
Theorem 100; This is the last Theorem in this book.
The Proof is Obvious.
In April of 2020, Conway was exposed to the corona virus and took a fever around the 8th of April.  He had suffered from ill health for an extended time, and in three days, on April 11, 2020 he died at his home in New Jersey.

I really enjoyed Siobhan Roberts biography of Conway.  You may, too.

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DEATHS
1624 Simon Marius (10 Jan 1573, 26 Dec 1624) (Also known as Simon Mayr) German astronomer, pupil of Tycho Brahe, one of the earliest users of the telescope and the first in print to make mention the Andromeda nebula (1612). He studied and named the four largest moons of Jupiter as then known: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto (1609) after mythological figures closely involved in love with Jupiter. Although he may have made his discovery independently of Galileo, when Marius claimed to have discovered these satellites of Jupiter (1609), in a dispute over priority, it was Galileo who was credited by other astronomers. However, Marius was the first to prepare tables of the mean periodic motions of these moons. He also observed sunspots in 1611 *TIS You can find a nice blog about the conflict with Galileo by the Renaissance Mathematicus.

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1931 Melvil Dewey (10 Dec 1851, 26 Dec 1931) American librarian who developed library science in the U.S., especially with his system of classification, the Dewey Decimal Classification (1876), for library cataloging. His system of classification (1876) uses numbers from 000 to 999 to cover the general fields of knowledge and designating more specific subjects by the use of decimal points. He was an activist in the spelling reform and metric system movements. Dewey invented the vertical office file, winning a gold medal at the 1893 World's Fair. It was essentially an enlarged version of a card catalogue, where paper documents hung vertically in long drawers. *TIS

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2006 Martin David Kruskal (September 28, 1925 – December 26, 2006) was an American mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions in many areas of mathematics and science, ranging from plasma physics to general relativity and from nonlinear analysis to asymptotic analysis. His single most celebrated contribution was the discovery and theory of solitons. His Ph.D. dissertation, written under the direction of Richard Courant and Bernard Friedman at New York University, was on the topic "The Bridge Theorem For Minimal Surfaces." He received his Ph.D. in 1952.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, he worked largely on plasma physics, developing many ideas that are now fundamental in the field. His theory of adiabatic invariants was important in fusion research. Important concepts of plasma physics that bear his name include the Kruskal–Shafranov instability and the Bernstein–Greene–Kruskal (BGK) modes. With I. B. Bernstein, E. A. Frieman, and R. M. Kulsrud, he developed the MHD (or magnetohydrodynamic) Energy Principle. His interests extended to plasma astrophysics as well as laboratory plasmas. Martin Kruskal's work in plasma physics is considered by some to be his most outstanding.
In 1960, Kruskal discovered the full classical spacetime structure of the simplest type of black hole in General Relativity. A spherically symmetric black hole can be described by the Schwarzschild solution, which was discovered in the early days of General Relativity. However, in its original form, this solution only describes the region exterior to the horizon of the black hole. Kruskal (in parallel with George Szekeres) discovered the maximal analytic continuation of the Schwarzschild solution, which he exhibited elegantly using what are now called Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates.
This led Kruskal to the astonishing discovery that the interior of the black hole looks like a "wormhole" connecting two identical, asymptotically flat universes. This was the first real example of a wormhole solution in General Relativity. The wormhole collapses to a singularity before any observer or signal can travel from one universe to the other. This is now believed to be the general fate of wormholes in General Relativity.
Martin Kruskal was married to Laura Kruskal, his wife of 56 years. Laura is well known as a lecturer and writer about origami and originator of many new models. Martin, who had a great love of games, puzzles, and word play of all kinds, also invented several quite unusual origami models including an envelope for sending secret messages (anyone who unfolded the envelope to read the message would have great difficulty refolding it to conceal the deed).
His Mother, Lillian Rose Vorhaus Kruskal Oppenheimer (See October 24 Births) was an American origami pioneer. She popularized origami in the West starting in the 1950s, and is credited with popularizing the Japanese term origami in English-speaking circles, which gradually supplanted the literal translation paper folding that had been used earlier. In the 1960s she co-wrote several popular books on origami with Shari Lewis.*wik

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2011 John Mackintosh Howie CBE FRSE (23 May 1936 – 26 December 2011) was a Scottish mathematician and prominent semigroup theorist.

Howie was educated at Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen, the University of Aberdeen and Balliol College, Oxford, where he wrote a Ph.D. thesis under the direction of Graham Higman.

In 1966 the University of Stirling was established with Walter D. Munn (fr) at head of the department of mathematics. Munn recruited Howie to teach there.

...a 'British school' of semigroup theory cannot be said to have taken off properly until the mid-1960s when John M. Howie completed an Oxford DPhil in semigroup theory (partly under Preston's influence) and Munn began to supervise research students in semigroups (most notably, Norman R. Reilly).[2]

He won the Keith Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1979–81. He was Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews from 1970 to 1997. No successor to this chair was named until 2015 when Igor Rivin was appointed.

Howie was charged with reviewing universal, comprehensive secondary education in Scotland, which was viewed as failing its students. Impressed with education in Denmark, his committee proposed a tracking scheme to improve academic outcomes, and communicated recommendations in Upper Secondary Education in Scotland (1992).

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2018 Roy Jay Glauber (September 1, 1925 – December 26, 2018)  was an American theoretical physicist. He was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Born in New York City, he was awarded one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", with the other half shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch.
In this work, published in 1963, he created a model for photodetection and explained the fundamental characteristics of different types of light, such as laser light (see coherent state) and light from light bulbs (see blackbody). His theories are widely used in the field of quantum optics. *Wik

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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