Showing posts sorted by date for query 123. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query 123. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, 1 September 2026

On This Day in Math- September 1

 



"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics"
Siméon Poisson

The 244th day of the year; 244 is the smallest number (besides 2) that can be written as the sum of 2 squares or the sum of two 5th powers. *What's Special about this number


244 is anti-perfect. The proper divisors are 1, 2, 4, 61, and 122, & adding their reversal is 1 + 2 + 4 + 16 + 221 = 244. *Jim Wilder ‏@wilderlab (244 is the smallest multi-digit anti-perfect number; There is one more year day which is anti-perfect.... don't just sit there, go find it!)

244 is also the sum of three cubes, \( 244 = 1^3 + 3^3 + 6^3 \)  

244 is "power friendly" with 136.   \(244 =1 ^3 + 3^3 + 6^3\) and  \(136 = 2^3 + 4^3 + 4^3\)



EVENTS

1488 The Plimpton Library has a copy of Anianus, Computus Manualis combined with Boethius, Arithmetica, which is probably the first book on mathematics printed in Strasburg. It DIDN'T happen on this date but I include it here because it has the first known printing of the little mnemonic that begins, “Thirty days hath September,”

*historyofscience.com


1672 Hooke's diary records " Calculated lengths of Glasses." from Hooke's Journal *Robert Hooke ‏@HookesLondon This was done using Hookes "musical cylinder" or string phone. In July 1664 Hooke produced an experiment to show the number of vibrations of an extended String, made in a determinate time, requested to give a certain Tone or Note, by which it was found that "a Wire making two hundred seventy two vibrations in one second of time sounded G Sol Re Vt. in the Scale of all Musick". Hooke had found that middle C had 272 beats a second, and on 1st September 1672 Hooke noted the he had invented an easy way for "a musical cylinder with pewter tips pinched between cylindrick rings". *Daniel P McVeigh, "An Early History of the Telephone 1664-1865"  

Today if we saw this device we would call it a string phone, although it was not clear from Hooke's notes that his intention was to speak through the device. What is clear is that the device was created for the purpose of making music.



1698 The last Russian year to begin on September 1. January 1, 1699 began a new year. *VFR but still on the Julian Calendar. Russia would not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 24 January 1918 when the Council of People's Commissars issued a Decree that Wednesday, 31 January 1918 was to be followed by Thursday, 14 February 1918, thus dropping 13 days from the calendar. *Wik


1742 a letter from Euler to Niklaus I Bernoulli on pentagonal number theorem. Euler also notes in this letter that the coefficients of the terms in the series
1 + 1n + 2n
2 + 3n
3 + 5n
4 + 7n
5 + 11n
6 + 15n
7 + 22n
8 + 30n
9 + 42n
10 + 56n
11 + etc.
give the number of different ways in which the exponent of the term can be made by addition, i.e. that it is the generating function for the (unrestricted) partition function. Euler then writes: “This series moreover arises from division, if unity were divided by \((1 − n)(1 − n^2)(1 − n^3)(1 − n^4)(1 − n^5 )\) etc., which product if expanded gives this expression \( 1 − n − n^2 + n^5 + n^7 − n^{12} − n^{15} + n^{22} + n^{26} − n^{35} − etc\) . where the precise way in which the exponents proceed I have not been able to penetrate, although by induction(Euler means experimentation and extrapolation of a pattern, not the proof by induction we use today) I have concluded for no other exponents to occur, unless they are contained in the formula (3xx ± x)/2; and this is such that the powers of n have the + sign if the exponents arise with an even number substituted for x”. *Jordan Bell, Euler and the Pentagonal Number Theorem


1849 On the night of September 1, 1849, the nearly full Moon appeared over the town of Canandaigua, New York. At 10:30 P.M., Samuel D. Humphrey slid a highly polished, silver-plated copper sheet measuring 2¾x1¾ inches into his camera, which was pointed at the Moon. After developing the plate with mercury vapor, he sent his daguerreotype to Harvard College. This is believed to be the oldest existing photo of the moon.
Many sources (Wikipedia, for instance) claim this is actually the first known photo of the moon was taken on March 23, 1840 (see my page for that date) by John W. Draper of New York City. Draper is credited with making a clearer daguerreotype of the (full) Moon in March 1840, and he sent a letter with a copy of the image to John Herschel. Others believe his original photo was destroyed in a fire. This may be due to some confusion about a photo taken the previous year by Daguerre, which burned in his laboratory fire. 

The first photographer is widely acknowledged to be a French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépcethe. He started experimenting with ways to record light in 1814. One of the oldest surviving photos of any kind was taken in 1825 when Niépce captured the black-and-white image of an engraving of a boy pulling a horse. However, this method required a full eight hours of exposure.

 *PB notes




A different photo that is claimed to be the oldest surviving photograph: View from the Window at Le Gras (French: Point de vue du Gras) is a heliographic image and the oldest surviving camera photograph. It was created by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and shows parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le Gras [fr], as seen from a high window.


below: The original plate (left) and colorized reoriented enhancement (right). The photo was found to be taken at his home from a second-story south-facing bedroom window.


1854 It was on this day that John Snow became aware of the cholera epidemic, and began his studies leading to the isolation of the Broad Street Pump. "Early on the morning of September 1st, 1854, in the Berwick Street district of St. James's, Westminster, where I had spent some hours of the preceding day without hearing any mention of cholera-and where, in former epidemics, the mortality from that disease had been inconsiderable-I was asked to visit a house in which lay, already collapsed, four persons who had been seized with cholera during the night; and, on leaving this house, whichever way I turned, I came upon similar scenes. At noon, when I met my brother curate and the Scripture-reader for a short time in the vestry of St. Luke's, Berwick Street, I learned that they had each been occupied all the morning in the same way as myself. The rest of the day was spent in the same manner; and, as an indication of the severity of the outbreak, I record that, of all the cholera patients visited by me on that day, only one recovered." *The John Snow Archives, For those who are unfamiliar with the case, a beautiful book:



John Snow Pub, and the notorious pump




1859 First recorded observation of a solar flare. Richard Christopher Carrington English astronomer was the first to map the motions of sunspots and thus discover from them that the Sun rotates faster at the equator than near the poles (equatorial acceleration). He observed that the sunspots were not attached to any solid object, and also discovered the movement of sunspot zones toward the Sun's equator as the solar cycle progresses. On 1 Sep 1859, Carrington was the first to record the observation of a solar flare. *TIS Richard Hodgson, another English amateur astronomer, independently made the observations of the same solar flare. *Wik He reported his Description of a Singular Appearance seen in the Sun in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (1860), "While engaged in the ... observation of ... solar spots ... two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out. ... I therefore noted down the time, ... and seeing the outburst to be very rapidly on the increase ... I hastily ran to call some one to witness ... and on returning within 60 seconds, was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled. Very shortly afterwards the last trace was gone. In this lapse of 5 minutes, the two patches of light traversed a space of about 35,000 miles."*TIS

a modern image of a solar flare



1861 (Sept ?) Sir Charles Bright and Mr. Latimer Clark proposed the names of ohm, volt, and farad for the practical units based on the centimetre-gramme-second absolute system, Sir William Thomson gave a cordial support; and on his initiative was formed the famous Committee of Electrical Standards of the British Association, which year by year has done so much to carry to perfection the standard and the methods of electrical measurement. *IEC History This seems to have been the first time a unit of measure was named for a famous scientist.

Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin



In 1869, Cleveland Abbe began a weather reporting system in Cincinnati, Ohio and published a weather bulletin which contained his first weather forecast on September 1, 1869. In the United States, on October 21, 1743, Benjamin Franklin had tracked a hurricane for the first time. It was the first recorded instance in which the progressive movement of a storm system was recognized. A photo gallery of the development of the US Weather Bureau is available here:
In 1847, the first weather warnings were issued via telegraph. In 1870, the National Weather Service was born. *Weather.about.com



1885  On September 5, 1885, Scientific American published a photograph depicting a “streak of real ‘Jersey lightning,’” taken by William Nicholson Jennings (1860-1946) at 10:30 p.m. on the first of August that same year. Captured on the roof of Jennings’ house in North Philadelphia and later reproduced as a lantern slide, the photograph reveals a flash of lightning traveling diagonally from the upper left corner of the frame to the horizon, illuminating the tops of trees and a line of row house roofs in the foreground. Regional and national newspapers soon proclaimed Jennings as the first to successfully photograph lightning with a camera.

The Today in Science claims an earlier occurrence.  " In 1884, the first photograph of a lightning flash made in the U.S. was made by W. C. Gurley of the Marietta Observatory, Ohio. The flash was about 3 miles away."  I don't have a picture of that one (but am willing to post one if someone can find it) so Jennings gets the plug.


*Panaroma





1902 The French film pioneer George Méliès presented the very first science fiction movie to the stunning public of the Paris Olympia theater. *Yovisto 



https://youtu.be/xLVChRVfZ74




1916 The first (late) summer meeting of the MAA was held at MIT, September 1-2, 1916. *MAA


1920 The central limit theorem didn't get it's name until 1920 even though the first version of the theorem was published in 1733. *Probability Fact ‏@ProbFact,
The first version of this theorem was postulated by Abraham de Moivre who used the normal distribution to approximate the distribution of the number of heads resulting from many tosses of a fair coin. The actual term "central limit theorem" (in German: "zentraler Grenzwertsatz") was first used by George Pólya in 1920 in the title of a paper, "Über den zentralen Grenzwertsatz der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung und das Momentenproblem", in Mathematische Zeitschrift. (9/1/1920) Pólya referred to the theorem as "central" due to its importance in probability theory. According to Le Cam, the French school of probability interprets the word central in the sense that "it describes the behavior of the center of the distribution as opposed to its tails". *Wik



1922 British chemist and physicist Francis W. Aston was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He developed the mass spectrometer, a device that separates molecular fragments of different mass and measures them with remarkable accuracy. Using the spectrometer, Aston discovered that neon had two isotopes, \(^{20} \)Ne and \(^{21} \)Ne, and was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize for this work. *RSC.org




1936 The first meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rudolf Carnap presented an invited address, “Truth in Mathematics and Logic,” to an audience of three hundred. *VFR


1939 Robert Oppenheimer wrote a seminal paper on black holes that went mostly overlooked and is still relatively un-noted because it was published on the same day that WWII began with German invasion of Poland.




1939 World War II began, as German troops marched into Poland.


1963 The scientific community learned about rotating black holes in general relativity #OTD in 1963, when Roy Kerr's groundbreaking paper appeared in Physical Review Letters. hat tip @RobertMcNees


1964 The Ryukyu Islands issued a stamp commemorating the opening of the Ryukyu Islands–Japan microwave system for telephone and telegraph messages. Pictured is a parabolic antenna, one of the many applications of the reflective properties of the conics. [Scott #123] *VFR





1967  Harvey Friedman was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, just three weeks before his nineteenth birthday. This is the youngest at which anyone has begun a university career. He is now a distinguished logician at The Ohio State University. (Guinness) See September 23, 1948, September 30, 1717, and November 19, 1982. *VFR



In 1997, the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle was announced, called the "exotic meson." Scientists speculated that the exotic meson might comprise four quarks, unlike all other known particles, which have three. The research team included physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y., and other facilities in the U.S. and Russia.*TIS


1994 U.S. Library of Congress starts "Virtual Library" project.The LOC holds the first of several meetings to plan a project to convert its materials to digital form so they will be accessible via computer networks to students and researchers around the world. The "virtual library" project could also save rare materials that are degrading or have been vandalized, as well as saving space for the library, whose belongings fill up 575 miles of shelving. At the time of the initial meeting -- at which librarians and technical experts from several major computer companies discussed strategy and funding -- the library hoped to have its most vulnerable materials digitized by the year 2000. *CHM


2008 John D. Barrow is appointed Gresham Professor of Geometry. He had previously held the Gresham chair in Astronomy, (2003-2007). *Wik






BIRTHS


1659 Joseph Saurin (September 1, 1659 at Courtaison – December 29, 1737 at Paris) . In the early seventeenth century he defended the calculus against the criticisms of Michael Rolle. *VFR He became friends with de L'Hôpital, Malebranche and Varignon but, by 1702, he was in dispute with Rolle over the calculus. This came about because of his role as mathematics editor of the Journal des Sçavants. He appealed to the Académie Royal des Sciences but, although Saurin was correct, they had no wish to come out against Rolle who was a member. Perhaps to be diplomatic, Saurin was elected to the Académie Royal des Sciences in 1707. *SAU In the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences in July of 1700, Michel Rolle voiced opposition to the use of infinitesimal magnitudes.Rolle was not alone in this project, for he allied himself with several mathematical conservatives, including the Abbé Jean Gallois and the Abbé Thomas Gouye, both of whom venerated the Greek standards of rigor and had significant reservations about the use of infinitesimal methods. Rolle's criticisms were later published in the memoir Du nouveau systême de l'infini, which he opened by declaring that

We have always regarded geometry as an exact science, and also as the source of the exactness which is spread throughout all the other parts of mathematics. We see among its principles only true axioms: all the theorems and all the problems proposed here are either solidly demonstrated or capable of a solid demonstration. And if it should happen that any false or less certain principles slip in, they should be at once banished from this science.
But it seems that this character of exactitude no longer reigns in geometry, ever since we became entangled in the new system of the infinitely small. For myself, I do not see that it has produced any new truth, and it seems to me that it often leads to error.

*Leibniz on the Foundations of the Calculus:
The Question of the Reality of Infinitesimal Magnitudes, Douglas M. Jesseph



1826 Alfred Ely Beach (1 Sep 1826; 1 Jan 1896) American inventor and publisher, whose Scientific American helped stimulate 19th-century technological innovations and became one of the world's most prestigious science magazines. Beach himself invented a tunneling shield and built the pneumatic tube subway (1870). In 1856 he won First Prize and a gold medal at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition. Beach had invented a typewriter for the blind. It resembled the modern typewriter in the arrangement of its keys and typebars, but embossed its letters on a narrow paper strip instead of a sheet. *TIS Beach purchased SA while the paper was still a small weekly journal with a circulation less than 300. It was bought for $800 in July 1846 by 20-year-old Beach as editor, and Orson Desaix Munn.




1835 William Stanley Jevons,(1 September 1835 – 13 August 1882) Political economist. He did early work in symbolic logic and built an early logic machine, the first that could solve complicated problems faster than they could be solved by hand.*VFR Irving Fisher described his book The Theory of Political Economy (1871) as beginning the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics as a science concerned with quantities is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. Jevons had written in his Principles of Science, p. 123, "Can the reader say what two numbers multiplied together will produce the number 8616460799 ? I think it unlikely that anyone but myself will ever know." This became known as Jevons' Number and was factored by Derrick Norman Lehmer in 1903. (Reader, try your hand.)
In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. *Wik



1902 Dirk Brouwer (1 Sep 1902; 31 Jan 1966) Dutch-born U.S. astronomer and geophysicist known for his achievements in celestial mechanics, especially for his pioneering application of high-speed digital computers for astronomical computations. While still a student he determined the mass of Titan from its influence on other Saturnian moons. Brouwer developed general methods for finding orbits and computing errors and applied these methods to comets, asteroids, and planets. He computed the orbits of the first artificial satellites and from them obtained increased knowledge of the figure of the earth. His book, Methods of Celestial Mechanics, taught a generation of celestial mechanicians. He also redetermined astronomical constants.*TIS







DEATHS


1648 Marin Mersenne died (8 September 1588 – 1 September 1648).Often called the center of the scientific world in the early 17th century for his communication with and between many of the most prominent scientific minds of the period. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those which can be written in the form Mn = 2^p − 1 for some prime integer p.

 He also performed extensive experiments to determine the acceleration of falling objects by comparing them with the swing of pendulums, reported in his Cogitata Physico-Mathematica in 1644. He was the first to measure the length of the seconds pendulum, that is a pendulum whose swing takes one second, and the first to observe that a pendulum's swings are not isochronous as Galileo thought, but that large swings take longer than small swings. *Wik




1687 Henry More (October 12, 1614 – September 1, 1687) was an English philosopher of science whose ideas may have influenced Newton. One other thing about Henry More which we should discuss is his relation to Newton. Newton was born close to Grantham and attended the Free School in Grantham. In fact he had lodgings in Grantham for seven years with a Mr Clark, the brother of a teacher at the Free School. More, who was about 30 years older than Newton, often returned to his home town of Grantham and when he did so he lived with one of the two Clark brothers. Therefore when More was a major figure at Cambridge he must have got to know the young pupil Newton. We certainly know that there was contact between Newton and More up till the time More was around 70 years of age.
Did More's ideas of space influence Newton? It is impossible to say with any certainty, but we can certainly note that Newton's idea of absolute space and time was crucial to his physics and that this notion of space is closely related to that put forward by More in his arguments against Descartes. Also in terms of gravity, for Descartes it was necessary to have an interaction through matter between the bodies. For Newton gravity was a force which acted through empty space and although he does not appear to have identified space with God as More did, nevertheless the spiritual aspect of space supported Newton's gravitational theories. *SAU




1716 Heinrich Meissner (April 20th 1644 in Hamburg - September 1 1716 Hamburg) was a co-founder of the Hamburg Masters and computing Mathematical Society in Hamburg. This is the oldest existing mathematical society in the world.
From 1688 until shortly before his death he was "writing, arithmetic and upper-master" of the parish school of St. Jacobi .
Meissner founded (Jan 2, 1690) along with Valentin Heins 'art-accounting practicing Society ", which became Hamburg Mathematical Society .
Meissner published a whole series of books and magazines. Worth mentioning are especially the key star and Algebrae, a textbook on algebra in the German language, and the Teutsche Euclid, a translation of the first two books in the "Elements" of Euclid with extensive annotations. *Wik




1662  Paul Halcke (also: Halcken or Halke), (1662 in Elmshorn, 1731 in Buxtehude) was a German mathematician, writer, computer, and calendar maker.

He was the brother of writer and computer Johann Halcke and founded, in 1690, together with Heinrich Meißner, the Hamburgischen Kunst-Rechnungs lieb- und übenden Societät, today's Hamburg Mathematical Society. Since about 1687 he was writer and calculator at the city school of Buxtehude.

In 1694 he issued a solution's book to a collection of exercises by Heinrich Meißner, and later he published his own collection of 574 exercises from mathematics and astronomy, entitled Mathematischer Sinnen-Confect ("mathematical mind candy"), which was translated in various languages and remained a seminal textbook for more than a century. The exercises were enriched by poems and descriptions of the solving methods. In particular, exercise 289 on page 256 consists in finding the smallest Euler brick, for which Paul Halcke is most well-known today. This cuboid has sides and face diagonals of integer lengths {44, 117, 240} and {125, 244, 267}.

Halcken was also the first (1729) to show that  the product of the aliquot divisors of 24, equals its cube, \(1*2*3*4*6*8*12 = 13824=24^3\)  and that the same fact is true about 40.

He also edited several popular calendars for the years 1705, 1707, 1715, 1716 and 1725.

An Euler brick, named after Leonhard Euler, is a rectangular cuboid whose edges and face diagonals all have integer lengths. A primitive Euler brick is an Euler brick whose edge lengths are relatively prime. A perfect Euler brick is one whose space diagonal is also an integer, but such a brick has not yet been found.



1908 Aleksandr Nikolayevich Korkin (3 March [O.S. 19 February] 1837–September 1, 1908) was a Russian mathematician. He made contribution to the development of partial differential equations. After Chebyshev, Korkin was the most important initiator of the formation of the Saint Petersburg Mathematical School*Wik




1982 Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach​ (4 December 1886, 1 September 1982 wrote a habilitation thesis in 1911 about groups of Euclidean motions – identifying conditions under which the group must have a translational subgroup whose vectors span the Euclidean space – that helped solve Hilbert's 18th problem. He worked on complex analysis and its applications to other areas in mathematics. He is known for his work on dynamics in several complex variables, where he obtained results similar to Fatou's. In 1916 he formulated the Bieberbach conjecture, stating a necessary condition for a holomorphic function to map the open unit disc injectively into the complex plane in terms of the function's Taylor series.*Wik




1988 Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century.
In 1940 Alvarez joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he contributed to a number of World War II radar projects, from early improvements to Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) radar beacons, now called transponders, to a system known as VIXEN for preventing enemy submarines from realizing that they had been found by the new airborne microwave radars. The radar system for which Alvarez is best known and which has played a major role in aviation, most particularly in the post war Berlin airlift, was Ground Controlled Approach (GCA). Alvarez spent a few months at the University of Chicago working on nuclear reactors for Enrico Fermi before coming to Los Alamos to work for Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project. Alvarez worked on the design of explosive lenses, and the development of exploding-bridgewire detonators. As a member of Project Alberta, he observed the Trinity nuclear test from a B-29 Superfortress, and later the bombing of Hiroshima from the B-29 The Great Artiste.
After the war Alvarez was involved in the design of a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that allowed his team to take millions of photographs of particle interactions, develop complex computer systems to measure and analyze these interactions, and discover entire families of new particles and resonance states. This work resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968. He was involved in a project to x-ray the Egyptian pyramids to search for unknown chambers. With his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, he developed the Alvarez hypothesis which proposes that the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs was the result of an asteroid impact. *Wik




1982 Haskell Brooks Curry (12 Sep 1900; 1 Sep 1982)American mathematician who was a pioneer of modern mathematical logic. His research in the foundations of mathematics led him to the development of combinatory logic. Later, this seminal work found significant application in computer science, especially in the design of programming languages. Curry worked on the first electronic computer, called ENIAC, during WW II. He also formulated a logical calculus using inferential rules. In 1942, he published Curry's paradox, which occurs in naive set theory or naive logics, and allows the derivation of an arbitrary sentence from a self-referring sentence and some apparently innocuous logical deduction rules.*TIS




2006 Warren J. Mitofsky, (17 September 1934 - 1 September 2006)While working at the Census Bureau in the 1960s, he and a colleague, Joseph Waksberg, began to devise a random-digit dialing (RDD) system that now bears both their names.
Mr. Mitofsky went to work at CBS News in 1967. Not long afterwards, he organized the first "exit poll" in a Kentucky gubernatorial election, with his first national exit poll being in 1972. He directed the CBS News Election and Survey Unit until 1990, leading, in 1975, to the joint effort with the NYTimes, the CBS News/New York
Times Poll (which The Times calls the New York Times/CBS News Poll),
which he directed until 1990.
Since 2003, Mitofsky, considered the "Father of Exit Polling" by many, led election-night analysis for the News Election Pool, providing exit-poll results and projections. (Mitofsky disliked the term "exit poll"; he preferred "Election Day survey".)
In exit polls on Election Day in 2004, Mitofsky's early exit polls found Senator John Kerry leading over President Bush, which led some in the news media to prepare for Senator Kerry becoming President Kerry. But such was too premature, as Mitofsky readily acknowledged, later discovering that the pro-Kerry exit-poll lead was caused by Republicans refusing to participate at a greater rate than Democrats in the exit polls. [Guess this shows the importance of not ignoring nonresponse.]
However, despite all this, Mitofsky will probably be best remembered by many for his efficient method of sampling telephone numbers using random-digit dialing (RDD), which is now known as the Mitofsky-Waksberg Method. In 1970, Mitofsky wrote an unpublished CBS News memorandum titled "Sampling of Telephone Households" that helped make his name a household word in public-opinion polling. Eight years later, Joseph Waksberg published an analogous paper, "Sampling Methods for Random Digit Dialing", in the prestigious Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), thus resulting in the Mitofsky-Waksberg Method appellation.
The Mitofsky-Waksberg Method of RDD is a cluster-sampling method
for sampling residential telephone numbers that greatly increases
the percentage of calls that do reach residential households. *David Bee





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




Monday, 17 August 2026

On This Day in Math - August 17

   

On the 410th birthday of Fermat, Google Doodles his famous theorem'/conjecture. 
Unfortunately, the doodle was to small to contain the proof.


 
Base eight is just like base ten, really… if you're missing two fingers!
~Tom Lehrer, "New Math"


The 229th Day of the Year
229 is the 50th prime, and is the smallest prime that added up to the reversal of its digits yields another prime, (229 + 922) = 1151 (can you find the next one?)  
If you replace each digit with its ten complement, you get 881, another prime.  

The sum of the digits of 229 is prime (13) and the sum of squares of the digits is also prime (89).

It can be written as a sum of positive squares in only one way, i.e., 225 + 4 = 15^2 + 2^2 .

extra: 229 is the difference between 3³ and 4⁴ *jim wilder ‏@wilderlab

If you replace each digit of 229 with its square, you get a prime number, 4481. If you do the same with its cube, you get 88729, another prime. *Prime Curios

1/229 has 228 digits in its period

100! + 229 is prime

2^229 is a 69-digit number containing only one zero. Is this the largest power of two that has one or more unique digits? *Prime Curios

If you draw K13, the complete graph with 13 vertices so that it has the fewest possible crossings, it will still have 229 crossings *Wikipedia

1/229 has 228 digits in its period


See More Math Facts for every Year Day, here


EVENTS

1585 The Roanoak Colony in Virginia (to later become known as the "lost" colony) was founded on this day by Sir Walter Raleigh's agents, led by Ralph Lane. If you don't know why that is on a math page, read more here.



1654  Frontispiece from Curious Talks on the Solar Eclipse of August 12, 1654 by Orthodox Theophrastus; "let there be only fear of the shadow" "love of light"

*Astro museum



1655 William Oughtred writes to John Wallis to praise his methods in "Arithmetica Infinitorum" . It was received too late to be included in the first edition, but was included in the 1695 second edition.  *The Arithmetics of Infinitesimals, J. Stedall, pg 11




1762 The Board of Longitude Grants £500 to Christopher Irwin for his marine chair. Marine chairs, despite often having been ignored by modern scholars in favor of the chronometer and lunar-distance approaches to estimating longitude, reappeared throughout the history of the British Commissioners of the Longitude. Christopher Irwin of Ireland generated a lot of national and international interest in the late 1750s and early 1760s with his design. The Board funded the finishing and sea trial of it, granting him £500 on 17 August 1762. Nevil Maskelyne considered the chair alongside the lunar-distance method and one of John Harrison's longitude timekeepers on his 1763 trip to Barbados. (Maskelyne, who in 1765 would become Astronomer Royal and a Commissioner of Longitude, reported that the invention was useless. *Cambridge Digital Library




1771 Joseph Priestley sets out to test the rejuvenating effect of mint growing in a sealed container. He placed a candle in the covered glass and let it burn out in the presence of the mint. Ten days later he would return to the experiment and relight the candle and found, "it burned perfectly well in it." *Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air  

(And because student's WILL ask..)

In 1771 and 1772, Joseph Priestley performed a series of experiments that revealed the essential role of air in the growth of green plants.

Priestley observed that a candle burning in a closed space such as a bell jar, soon gets extinguished. Similarly, a mouse would soon suffocate in a closed space.

It was known that a candle placed in a sealed bell jar would eventually burn out and could not be relighted while still in the jar.

In August 1771, Joseph Priestley, placed a mint plant into a transparent closed space with a candle that burned out the air until it soon went out.

After 27 days, he relit the extinguished candle again. Since there was no bright source of light available that time, Priestly had to rely on the sun. He focused sunlight beams with a mirror onto the candle wick and was successful in relighting the candle from outside the bell jar without disturbing the experimental set up.




1811 “Having to conduct my grandson through his course of mathematics, I have resumed the study with great avidity. It was ever my favorite one. We have no theories there, no uncertainties remain on the mind; all is demonstration and satisfaction.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson (1743– 1826) to Benjamin Rush. Taken from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by A. A. Lipscomb, vol. 13 (1903), p. 75, as quoted from Cajori, Mathematics in Liberal Education, p. 109, which is a collection of interesting quotations on the value of mathematics.  The following year, his 70th, Jefferson describes his early affection for mathematics in a letter to William Duane "When I was young, mathematics was the passion of my life." *John Fauval, lecture at Univ of Va.



1825 A royal decree granted Niels Henrik Abel, then 23, sufficient funds for a year’s travel in France and Germany. *VFR


1859 John Wise (February 24, 1808 – September 28, 1879) was a pioneer in the field of ballooning. He made over 400 flights during his lifetime and was responsible for several innovations in balloon design.

He was the first to observe the jet stream, noting there was a "great river of air which always blows from west to east". On August 17, 1859, he made the first flight of local airmail in the U.S. from Lafayette, Indiana, to Crawfordsville, Indiana, in a balloon named Jupiter, carrying 123 letters and 23 circulars of which one cover was discovered in 1957.His trip of 25 miles (40 km) ended when he was forced to land by lack of buoyancy. The intended destination was New York City or Philadelphia, Pa. 

Another source says weather issues forced Wise to land in Crawfordsville after five hours and only 30 miles, and the mail was then delivered to its final destination by train.Wise starts the first airmail delivery in the United States on August 17, 1859 from Lafayette, Indiana.  

It wasn't until February 1911 that the first airmail flight in an airplane took place when three letters were carried the short distance between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, California.  *PBNotes





1877 Asaph Hall discovered Phobos, inner satellite of Mars. The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, were found when American astronomer Hall identified them after a long search, although their existence had been a source of speculation before. The possibility of Martian moons had been speculated long before Hall's discovery. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) even predicted their number correctly, although with faulty logic: he wrote that since Jupiter had four known moons and Earth had one, it was only natural that Mars should have two. Perhaps inspired by Kepler (and quoting Kepler's third law), Jonathan Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels (1726) refers to two moons in Part 3, Chapter 3 (the "Voyage to Laputa"), in which the astronomers of Laputa are described as having discovered two satellites of Mars orbiting at distances of 3 and 5 Martian diameters, and periods of 10 and 21.5 hours, respectively. The actual orbital distances and periods of Phobos and Deimos of 1.4 and 3.5 Martian diameters, and 7.6 and 30.3 hours, respectively. Hall discovered Deimos on August 12, 1877 at about 07:48 UTC and Phobos on August 18, 1877, at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., at about 09:14 GMT (contemporary sources, using the pre-1925 astronomical convention that began the day at noon, give the time of discovery as August 11, 14:40 and August 17 16:06 Washington mean time respectively)*Wik In the words of Asaph Hall, "Of the various names that have been proposed for these satellites, I have chosen those suggested by Mr Madan of Eton, England, viz: Deimos for the outer satellite; Phobos for the inner satellite. These are generally the names of the horses that draw the chariot of Mars. "




1896 Mrs. Bridget Driscoll of Croydon, Surrey, became the 1st pedestrian in Britain to die after being hit by a car. Mrs Driscoll, a 44 year old housewife, who was traveling from Old Town, Croydon to a folk-dancing display in Crystal Palace, was hit by a demonstration car traveling at 4mph (according to the driver, Arthur Edsel) . She died within minutes of receiving a head injury. At her inquest, Coroner William Percy Morrison said he hoped that "such a thing would never happen again" and was the first to apply the term ‘accident’ to violence caused by speed. Coroners across the country have followed his example ever since. *Road Safety Center Cardiff.

The first known death by a motor vehicle was Mary Ward (née King; 27 April 1827 – 31 August 1869) .  She was an Irish naturalist, astronomer, microscopist, author, and artist. She was killed when she fell under the wheels of an experimental steam car built by her cousins. As the event occurred in 1869, she is the first person known to have been killed by a motor vehicle.

Bridget as a child


Mary Ward




1934 Dunham Jackson personalizes a book. Harold Bacon recalls that Jackson was an inspired writer of limericks. When Bacon purchased Jackson's "The Theory of Approximations" he took it to Jackson's office and requested he sign it, suggesting a limerick. Without any visible prethought Jackson wrote on the flyleaf:

There was a young fellow named Bacon Whose judgement of books was mistaken In a moment too rash He relinquished some cash And his faith in the Author was shaken August 17, 1934

*Steven Krantz, Mathematical Apocrypha Redux Harold M Bacon was a long-serving calculus professor at Stanford where a teaching award in his name has been created since his death in 1992. 

Bacon was a math professor at Stanford, pictured here with his spouse and son Charles, who "grew up at Stanford", and is an American geologist and volcanologist at the United States Geological Survey in the Volcano Hazards Team

Bacon, wife, and epsilon at Stanford



1941 When Herbert Robbins saw the proof sheet of the title page of What is Mathematics? with only the name Richard Courant on it, his first reaction was “My god, the man’s a crook.” Realizing that a quiet meeting on their co-authorship of the book would be impossible, Robbins wrote Courant on this date that, while the custom might be different in Europe, in this country the junior author did receive credit. Courant backed down, and so today we know this lovely book as one by Courant and Robbins. For the two sides of this story see Constance Reid, Courant in Gottingen and New York. The Story of an Improbable Mathematician (Springer 1976), 223– 226 and 230–232 as well as “An interview with Herbert Robbins,” The College Mathematics Journal, 15(1984), 4–6. *VFR




1950 The National Bureau of Standards dedicates its Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles. Rather than testing components like its companion, the SEAC, the SWAC had an objective of computing using relatively off-the-shelf technology. It used a Williams Tube -- a modified CRT capable of modest (256 word) electrostatic bit storage -- and a magnetic drum (4,096 words) for storage. The word length was 37-bits and it could add two operands in 64 microseconds.

The SWAC performed much useful work, including searching for Mersenne prime numbers, X-ray crystallography, linear and differential equation solving and operated until December 1967.

Parts of SWAC are on display at The Computer History Museum. *CHM

SWAC at UCLA  *CHM



1966 Launch of Pioneer 7, American solar satellite. Studied prominences and solar atmosphere. *NSEC


1970   Venera 7 is launched by the USSR. It will later become the first spacecraft to successfully 

 transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus) * @thepainterflynn 





BIRTHS

1601 Pierre de Fermat (17 Aug 1601; 12 Jan 1665) French mathematician, often called the founder of the modern theory of numbers. Together with Rene Descartes, Fermat was one of the two leading mathematicians of the first half of the 17th century. He anticipated differential calculus with his method of finding the greatest and least ordinates of curved lines. He proposed the famous Fermat's Last Theorem while studying the work of the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus. He wrote in pencil in the margin, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain," that when the Pythagorean theorem is altered to read an + bn = cn, the new equation cannot be solved in integers for any value of n > 2 . *TIS

*Linda Hall org


1904 Giovanni Ricci (17 August 1904 – 9 September 1973) was an Italian mathematician.

He was born and brought up in Florence, where he did his school education. He then moved to Pisa to study mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore (associated with the University of Pisa). He was an assistant professor at the University of Rome for two years until 1928 when he moved to his alma mater Scuola Normale Superiore, where he was a professor for 8 years and produced research works in the fields of number theory, differential geometry, mathematical analysis, and theory of series, with highly significant results being obtained on the Goldbach conjecture and Hilbert's seventh problem.

Ricci moved to the University of Milano towards the end of 1936, where he remained as a professor for 36 years until his death on 9 September 1973. While in Milan, Ricci was largely committed to teaching and administrative work and his research output declined.

Ricci served as the president of Italian Mathematical Union from 1964 to 1967. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei since 1957. He was also a member of Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere.
Ricci is noted to have had a significant influence on Fields Medal-winning mathematician Enrico Bombieri



1904 Jakob Levitzki, also known as Yaakov Levitsky (Hebrew: יעקב לויצקי) (17 August 1904 – 25 February 1956) was an Israeli mathematician.

Levitzki was born in 1904 in the Russian Empire and emigrated to then Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1912. After completing his studies at the Herzliya Gymnasia, he travelled to Germany and, in 1929, obtained a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Emmy Noether. In 1931, after two years at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, Levitzki returned to Palestine to join the faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Levitzki together with Shimshon Amitsur, who had been one of his students at the Hebrew University, were each awarded the Israel Prize in exact sciences in 1953, the inaugural year of the prize, for their work on the laws of noncommutative rings.

Levitzki's son Alexander Levitzki, a recipient of the Israel Prize in 1990, in life sciences, established the Levitzki Prize in the name of his parents, Jacob and Charlotte, for Israeli research in the field of algebra.*Wik





1936 Margaret Heafield Hamilton (August 17, 1936 - ) is a computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. In one of the critical moments of the Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton's team's work prevented an abort of the landing on the Moon. Among other things, Hamilton credits the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) together with its asynchronous executive as a foundation that provided the means for her to design systems software that included AGC error detection and recovery mechanisms such as the Display Interface Routines, the purpose of which was to warn the astronauts in case of an emergency, by interrupting the astronaut's normal mission sequence displays and replacing them with priority displays (e.g., the priority displays of the 1201 and 1202 alarms that took place during the Apollo 11 landing). Three minutes before the Lunar lander reached the Moon's surface, several computer alarms were triggered. The computer was overloaded with incoming data, because the rendezvous radar system (not necessary for landing) updated an involuntary counter in the computer, which stole cycles from the computer. Due to its robust architecture, the computer was able to keep running; the Apollo onboard flight software was developed using an asynchronous executive so that higher priority jobs (important for landing) could interrupt lower priority jobs. Hamilton has published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports concerned with the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved. *Wik

In 2016, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, the highest civilian honor in the United States.




1954 Ingrid Daubechies ( born 17 August 1954- ) is a Belgian physicist and mathematician. Ingrid Daubechies is currently the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University.   In January 2011 she moved to Duke University as a Professor in mathematics. She is the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union (2011–2014). She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression. In 2000 Daubechies became the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, presented every 4 years for excellence in published mathematical research. The award honored her "for fundamental discoveries on wavelets and wavelet expansions and for her role in making wavelets methods a practical basic tool of applied mathematics." In January 2005, Daubechies became just the third woman since 1924 to give the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture sponsored by the American Mathematical Society. Her talk was on "The Interplay Between Analysis and Algorithm."*Wik

She was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2023, becoming the first woman to receive this award. In January 2025, Daubechies was a recipient of the National Medal of Science from President Joe Biden..


At ICM in 2018



DEATHS


1786 Death of Frederick the Great. Euler's interest in lotteries began at the latest in 1749 when he was commissioned by Frederick the Great to render an opinion on a proposed lottery. The first of two letters began 15 September 1749. A second series began on 17 August 1763.


1924 Pavel Samuilovich Urysohn, Pavel Uryson (February 3, 1898, Odessa – August 17, 1924, Batz-sur-Mer) is best known for his contributions in the theory of dimension, and for developing Urysohn's Metrization Theorem and Urysohn's Lemma, both of which are fundamental results in topology. His name is also commemorated in the term Menger-Urysohn dimension and in the term Urysohn integral equation. The modern definition of compactness was given by him and Pavel Alexandrov in 1923.*Wik




1927 (Erik) Ivar Fredholm (7 Apr 1866,17 Aug 1927) Swedish mathematician who founded modern integral equation theory. *TIS


1969 Otto Stern (17 Feb 1888; 17 Aug 1969 at age 81) German-American scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1943 for his development of the molecular beam as a tool for studying the characteristics of molecules and for his measurement of the magnetic moment of the proton. *TIS

He is the second most nominated person for a Nobel Prize, with 82 nominations during the years 1925–1945.  Stern was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1945 and the American Philosophical Society in 1946. *??


An interesting anecdote about Stern I found from Thomas Annesley, U of Mich Medical School Professor.  

"In 1922, Stern and colleague Walther Gerlach set out to test the two theories of the structure of the atom. In Niels Bohr’s model, electrons moved in discrete orbits and directions around a nucleus in a magnetic field (like planets revolving around the sun). In the other model, electrons could be oriented any which way in a magnetic field. To prove which model was correct, Gerlach, with Stern’s guidance, created an apparatus that would shoot a concentrated beam of superhot vaporized silver through a nonconsistent magnetic field, after which the silver atoms would deposit on a tiny glass plate. If Bohr’s model was correct, the electrons in the silver atoms would move in only two directions (think up or down) under the influence of the magnet, and two lines of deposited silver would be observed. If the other model was correct, the magnetic field would cause the electrons to randomly scatter, with silver deposited in a blob shape.

Gerlach worked into the night performing the experiment. He looked at the glass plate and saw no silver deposit on it. He called Stern over and gave him a “What happened?” look. Stern, who had his ever-present cigar in his mouth, saw nothing on the plate. Puffing away, Stern leaned in close to figure out why the plate looked blank. As his smoke-ladened breath hit the plate, something weird began to happen. The trace of the beam began to appear and got darker. Two lines appeared.

It suddenly dawned on the duo what was going on. A layer of silver had been deposited just like planned, but it was too thin to be seen by the naked eye. The sulfur in the cheap cigars Stern smoked had reacted with the silver on the plate to create silver sulfide, a jet-black substance. The cigar smoke had acted as if it were a developing solution used to produce photos on film. The two lines confirmed Niels Bohr’s model of the atom. Although it must have pained Gerlach to admit that Niels Bohr’s directional quantization model was indeed correct, Gerlach sent Bohr a congratulatory postcard on February 8, 1922, which showed the results from the now-famous experiment.

  Stern continued to refine his beam techniques. With the money he received for his prize, Stern could have refined his taste in cigars. Likely not. There may be nothing like a good cigar paired with a fine whiskey, but there’s also nothing like a cheap cigar paired with a Nobel Prize .

 1.    Beer and the Nobel Prize. Thomas M. Annesley. Ingram Spark, 2025."





1894  Cypra Cecilia Krieger Dunaj ( 9 April 1894. Jasło, Galicia, Austrian Empire{Poland},  17 August 1974. Ontario, Canada)  was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from a Canadian university and only the third person to be awarded a mathematics doctorate in Canada. She is best known for her English translation of Sierpinski's Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952).

Her doctoral dissertation was On the summability of trigonometric series with localized properties - on Fourier constants and convergence factors of double Fourier series. It was published in two parts, the first, On the summability of trigonometric series with localized properties, in 1928 and the second, On Fourier constants and convergence factors of double Fourier series, in 1930, both in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada. 
Despite her credentials and experience, Krieger spent over a decade as a lecturer before being promoted to assistant professor in 1941. She taught courses in the Mathematics and Engineering departments - an average of 13 classes a week, some with as many as 75 students in each class. With such a demanding teaching schedule there was little time for research, yet she persevered, working on her own projects in the evenings.
Krieger is best known for her English translation of Sierpinski's Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952). In this latter book she presented a 30 page appendix on the theory of infinite cardinals and ordinals. 
I should also mention her work for the Canadian Association of University Women. She strongly supported women having the chance to succeed in mathematics.
The Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship mentioned above was set up by the Canadian Mathematical Society in 1995. The reasons why the Society decided to name the prize for Krieger is described by Laura Turner 
"... in an effort "to attach an appropriate name to this prestigious award" the decision was made to solicit input from Canadian Mathematical Society members as well, with each submitted name to be accompanied by an explanation of why it was suitable. It is not clear just how many submissions were received by either the Executive Committee or the ad hoc committee charged with the task of gathering information, receiving suggestions, and making recommendations for names to the Canadian Mathematical Society Board, but the decision was understood as nontrivial. According to the report of the ad hoc committee, at least three possible names were proposed for the lectureship. The Executive of the Canadian Mathematical Society, having considered the possibilities, proposed in December of 1994: "That the Prize for Outstanding Research by Women in Mathematics be named the Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship, pending consultation with the families." The motion was carried unanimously."



2004 Shizuo Kakutani August 28 1911, August 17 2004) was a Japanese-born American mathematician, best known for his eponymous fixed-point theorem. The Kakutani fixed-point theorem is a generalization of Brouwer's fixed-point theorem, holding for generalized correspondences instead of functions. Its most important uses are in proving the existence of Nash equilibria in game theory, and the Arrow–Debreu–McKenzie model of general equilibrium theory. Kakutani's other mathematical contributions include the Kakutani skyscraper, a concept in ergodic theory (a branch of mathematics that studies dynamical systems with an invariant measure and related problems). They also include his solution of the Poisson equation using the methods of stochastic analysis. The Collatz (or 3n+1) conjecture is also known as the Kakutani conjecture. *Wik

The following story I found on LinkedIn, but the Professor's name did't copy.  when I find it I will restore credit:  




2024 Pierre Emile Jean Cartier(10 June 1932 – 17 August 2024) is a French mathematician . His main interest is the algebraic geometry , presentation and category theory . 1957-1959 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study . From 1961 he was a professor at the University of Strasbourg (then Faculté de Science). In 1971 he was appointed professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris. He was also from 1974 Director of Research CNRS. In 1982 he became a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique and 1988 at the ENS. Pierre Cartier led the Cartier operator and is the namesake of the Cartier divisor . *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