I began to understand that pure mathematics was more than a collection of random tools mainly fashioned for use in the Cambridge treatment of natural philosophy.
Andrew ForsythEVENTS
1558 Robert Recorde’s will was admitted to probate, after he died in prison. He introduced the equals sign in The Whetstone of Witte (1557) with the words: “And to avoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes: is equalle to: I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a pair of paralleles, or Gemowe lines of one lenghte, thus: because noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle.” “Gemowe” is an old French work meaning “twin.”. *VFR When they are asked what they would use if this was not available, it seems difficult for students to imagine a different symbol.
1584 Jacob Christmann appointed professor of Hebrew at Heidelberg. In 1595 he defended the view that the circle could only be approximately squared. *VFR
1864 Lewis Carroll finally decided to write up Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. [Stuart Dodgson Collingwook, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 96]
1928, aviator Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She had accepted the invitation of the American pilots Wilmer Stultz (1900-29) and Louis Gordon to join them on the transatlantic flight. The crossing from Newfoundland to Wales took about 21 hours. Amelia Earhart went on to establish herself as a respected role model, tirelessly demonstrating that young women were as capable as men in succeeding in their chosen vocations. In 1935 she crossed the Atlantic solo in record time: 13 hr 30 min. *TIS
1983 Sally Ride, astrophysicist, becomes the first American woman in space. The Soviets were ahead by twenty years and two days.*VFR
BIRTHS
1799 William Lassell was a wealthy amateur English astronomer. He set up an observatory at Starfield, near Liverpool. England, He built his own 24" diameter telescope, and devised steam-driven equipment for grinding an polishing the speculum metal mirror. This telescope was the first of its size to be mounted "equitorially" to allow easy tracking of the stars. He discovered Triton, a moon of Neptune, and Ariel and Umbriel, satellites of Uranus. Later, Lassell built a 48" diameter telescope with th same design and took it to Malta for observations with clearer skies.*TIS
1818 Pietro Angelo Secchi (18 Jun 1818, 26 Feb 1878 at age 59) Italian Jesuit priest and astrophysicist, who made the first survey of the spectra of over 4000 stars and suggested that stars be classified according to their spectral type. He studied the planets, especially Jupiter, which he discovered was composed of gasses. Secchi studied the dark lines which join the two hemispheres of Mars; he called them canals as if they where the works of living beings. (These studies were later continued by Schiaparelli.) Beyond astronomy, his interests ranged from archaeology to geodesy, from geophysics to meteorology. He also invented a meteorograph, an automated device for recording barometric pressure, temperature, wind direction and velocity, and rainfall.*TIS
1858 Andrew Russell Forsyth born in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied at Liverpool College and was tutored by Richard Pendlebury before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating senior wrangler in 1881.[1] He was elected a fellow of Trinity and then appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Liverpool at the age of 24. He returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1884 and became Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1895. *Wik
In 1893 he published Theory of functions of a complex variable which had such an impact at Cambridge that function theory dominated there for many years. Whittaker writes... that this text:-
... had a greater influence on British mathematics than any work since Newton's Principia.
However the reputation of the book outside Britain was not high. In fact this is not surprising since the whole thrust of the book was to bring the great advances of Continental mathematics to Cambridge which Forsyth rightly saw as living in the past. He was well equipped to undertake this task for he traveled widely and, being a good linguist, was able to appreciate the advances made by authors writing in French and German.
On Cayley's death Forsyth was appointed to his chair in 1895 becoming the Sadleirian professor of Pure Mathematics. However his preference for technical mastery rather than rigorous analysis meant that he failed to inspire future pure mathematicians. In fact one would have to say that Forsyth was unlucky, for although he saw the importance of Continental mathematics, at the same time his greatest strengths lay in his ability to handle complex formulae. He therefore excelled at precisely the style of mathematics which he himself campaigned successfully to replace at Cambridge.
1884 Charles Weatherburn worked on vector analysis and differential geometry.*SAU
1884 Frieda Nugel was a German mathematician who was one of the first women to receive a doctorate in Germany *SAU
1913 Oswald Teichmüller's main contribution is in the area of geometric function theory.*SAU
1926 Allan Rex Sandage U.S. astronomer who (with Thomas A. Matthews) discovered, in 1960, the first optical identification of a quasi-stellar radio source (quasar), a starlike object that is a strong emitter of radio waves. Although a strange source of radio emission, in visible light, it looked like a faint star. Yet this object was emitting more intense radio waves and ultraviolet radiation than a typical star. He is best known for determining the first reasonably accurate value for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe.*TIS & Wik
DEATHS
1922 Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn, Dutch astronomer who used photography and statistical methods in determining the motions and spatial distribution of stars. Such work was the first major step after the works of William and John Herschel. He tried to solve the questions of space density of stars as a function of distance from the sun, and the distribution of starts according to brightness per unit volume. Some of his results had lasting value, but some were superceded because he had failed to account for the interstellar absorption. In studies using proper motion to determine stellar distances, he discovered stellar motions are not random, as previously thought, but that stars move in two "star streams" (1904). He introduced absolute magnitude and colour index as standard concepts.*TIS
1935 Alexander von Brill died. He worked on algebraic geometry and the theory of algebraic functions.
Born in Darmstadt, Hesse, he attended University of Giessen where he earned his doctorate under supervision of Alfred Clebsch. He held a chair at the University of Tübingen, where Max Planck was among his students.*Wik1980 Kazimierz Kuratowski died. He worked in the area of topology and set theory. He is best known for his theorem giving a necessary and sufficient condition for a graph to be planar.*SAU
Kuratowski's theorem: "A finite graph is planar if and only if it does not contain a subgraph that is a subdivision of K5 (the complete graph on five vertices) or K3,3 (complete bipartite graph on six vertices, three of which connect to each of the other three)." (in simpler, but less exact terms, it can be drawn in such a way that no edges cross each other." The well-known recreational problem of connecting three houses to three utilities is not possible to draw because it is K3,3 (below). The utility problem posits three houses and three utility companies--say, gas, electric, and water--and asks if each utility can be connected to each house without having any of the gas/water/electric lines/pipes pass over any other. (1913 Dudeney: first publication of Gas, Water and Electricity Problem. according to David Singmaster, Gardner says 1917) (see June 21)
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
