On This Day in Math - February 22

Illustration from "On the forms of plane quartics", by Ruth Gentry

Suppose a contradiction were to be found in the axioms of set theory. Do you seriously believe that a bridge would fall down?
~Frank P. Ramsey

The 53rd day of the year; the month and day are both prime a total of 53 times in every leap year, but not today.

If you reverse the digits of 53 you get its hexadecimal representation; no other two digit number has this quality.

The sum of the first 53 primes is 5830, which is divisible by 53. It is the last year day for which n divides the sum of the first n primes.

And 53 is the smallest prime number that can not form a larger prime by appending a digit to the front or back.  (Can you find the 2nd smallest?)

EVENTS

1535 On this day the contestants, Tartaglia and Fiore, were to deliver the answer to the 30 questions they were asking of their opponent to a notary. I assume the contest went on the same day, and it may not have taken long. Thony Christie at the Renaissance Mathematicus described it this way, "Tartaglia sat down and almost instantly gave the correct answers to Fiore’s entire list, who was completely unable to solve a single one of Tartaglia’s questions. This whitewash made Tartaglia a star amongst the reckoning masters." In Mario Livio's "The Equation That Couldn't be Solved" he says that Tartaglia finished all 30 of Fiore's questions in less than two hours. All 30 of Fiore's questions were of the form ax³ + bx = c, and Tartaglia had discovered a general solution for that type of cubic only eight days before the contest. 

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1630 Popcorn was introduced to the English colonists at their first Thanksgiving dinner on this date (admit it, you thought it was in November) by Quadequina, brother of Massasoit. As his contribution to the dinner he offered a deerskin bag containing several bushels of “popped” corn. *Kane, Famous First Facts, p. 481 Popcorn is a type of corn with smaller kernels than regular corn, and when heated over a flame, it "pops" into the snack we know it as today. Native Americans were growing it for more than a thousand years before the arrival of European explorers. In 1964, scientists digging in southern Mexico found a small cob of popcorn discovered to be 7,000 years old. (don't you wonder if they tried to pop some of it?) Today, the United States grows nearly all of the world's popcorn. *TIS

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1805 Francois Arago picked to head the completion of the measurement of the Paris Meridian. He was a 19yr old student at the Ecole Polytechnique. He was nominated by his professor, Dennis Poisson and appointed on Feb 2, 1805 to finish the work began by Mechain and Delambre. He would leave for Spain on Sept 3 of the following year *Amir D Aczel, Pendulum, pg 75-78

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1876 The Johns Hopkins University Founded... commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Johns Hopkins maintains campuses in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Italy, China, and Singapore.
The university was founded on January 22, 1876 and named for its benefactor, the philanthropist Johns Hopkins. Daniel Coit Gilman was inaugurated as first president on February 22, 1876. On his death in 1873, Johns Hopkins, a Quaker entrepreneur and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million to fund a hospital and university in Baltimore, Maryland. At that time this fortune, generated primarily from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States.*Wik

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1877 J. J. Sylvester, at a commencement address at Johns Hopkins, gave his view on the relation between teaching and research: “An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorial effect, the less he will find himself in a fit state of mind to mathematicize.” See Midonick, The Treasury of Mathematics, p. 768. *VFR

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1880 American Poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1922) read his “Ode to The Johns Hopkins University”, which indicated the original faculty was “Led by the soaring-genius’d Sylvester.” [Osiris, 1(1936), p. 112] *VFR

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1926 At its fiftieth anniversary celebration, Johns Hopkins University awarded a long overdue doctorate to Christine Ladd-Franklin. Now a sprightly 79, she attended the ceremonies to collect her degree 44 years late. [New York Times, 23 February 1926, p. 12. Thanks to Judy Green. Also see Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, p. 46.] *VFR She applied to Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student, a university not traditionally open to women. A fellow contributor to the publication, Educational Times, who was familiar with her work, James J. Sylvester, noticed her name on a list of applicants and urged the university to admit her. In 1878, she was accepted on the terms that she would only attend his lectures.

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1965 Rwanda, in central Africa, issued a series of stamps honoring the National University of Rwanda at Butare. Included in the picture is a radical sign, in fact, this is the only stamp which includes a radical sign, a symbol which originated in Germany. For the complicated history of this symbol, see Math Words,
[Scott #84, 88] *VFR

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BIRTHS

1785 Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier (22 Feb 1785; 27 Oct 1845 at age 60)
French physicist who discovered the Peltier effect (1834), that at the junction of two dissimilar metals an electric current will produce heat or cold, depending on the direction of current flow. In 1812, Peltier received an inheritance sufficient to retire from clockmaking and pursue a diverse interest in phrenology, anatomy, microscopy and meteorology. Peltier made a thermoelectric thermoscope to measure temperature distribution along a series of thermocouple circuits, from which he discovered the Peltier effect. Lenz succeeded in freezing water by this method. Its importance was not fully recognized until the later thermodynamic work of Kelvin. The effect is now used in devices for measuring temperature and non-compressor cooling units. *TIS

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1796 (Lambert) Adolphe (Jacques) Quetelet (22 Feb 1796, 17 Feb 1874 at age 78) was a Belgian mathematician, astronomer, statistician, and sociologist known for his pioneering application of statistics and the theory of probability to social phenomena, especially crime. At an observatory in Brussels that he established in 1833 at the request of the Belgian government, he worked on statistical, geophysical, and meteorological data, studied meteor showers and established methods for the comparison and evaluation of the data. In Sur l'homme et le developpement de ses facultés, essai d'une physique sociale (1835) Quetelet presented his conception of the average man as the central value about which measurements of a human trait are grouped according to the normal curve. *TIS Quetelet created the Body Mass Index in a paper in 1832. It was known as the Quetelet Index until it was termed the Body Mass Index in 1972 by Ancel Keys.

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1817 Carl Borchardt (22 Feb 1817 in Berlin, Germany - 27 June 1880 in Rudersdorf (near Berlin), Germany) was a German mathematician who worked in a variety of areas in analysis. He edited Crelle's Journal for more than 30 years.*SAU

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1824 Pierre (-Jules-César) Janssen (22 Feb 1824, 23 Dec 1907) was a French astronomer who in 1868 devised a method for observing solar prominences without an eclipse (an idea reached independently by Englishman Joseph Norman Lockyer). Janssen observed the total Sun eclipse in India (1868). Using a spectroscope, he proved that the solar prominences are gaseous, and identified the chromosphere as a gaseous envelope of the Sun. He noted an unknown yellow spectral line in the Sun in 1868, and told Lockyer (who subsequently recognized it as a new element he named helium, from Greek "helios" for sun). Janssen was the first to note the granular appearance of the Sun, regularly photographed it, and published a substantial solar atlas with 6000 photographs (1904). *TIS

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1849 Nikolay Yakovlevich Sonin (February 22, 1849 – February 27, 1915) was a Russian mathematician.
Sonin worked on special functions, in particular cylindrical functions. He also worked on the Euler–Maclaurin summation formula. Other topics Sonin studied include Bernoulli polynomials and approximate computation of definite integrals, continuing Chebyshev's work on numerical integration. Together with Andrey Markov, Sonin prepared a two volume edition of Chebyshev's works in French and Russian. He died in St. Petersburg.*Wik

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1856 Micaiah John Muller Hill born. He worked in hydrodynamics, on the three-body problem, and has a differential equation named after him. *VFR He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1909 to 1911. His books on Euclids fifth and sixth books, and on the Theory of Proportion are available on the internet.

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1857 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (22 Feb 1857, 1 Jan 1894) was a German physicist who was the first to broadcast and receive radio waves. He studied under Kirchhoff and Helmholtz in Berlin, and became professor at Bonn in 1889. His main work was on electromagnetic waves (1887). Hertz generated electric waves by means of the oscillatory discharge of a condenser through a loop provided with a spark gap, and then detecting them with a similar type of circuit. Hertz's condenser was a pair of metal rods, placed end to end with a small gap for a spark between them. Hertz was also the first to discover the photoelectric effect. The unit of frequency - one cycle per second - is named after him. Hertz died of blood poisoning in 1894 at the age of 37. *TIS

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1862 Ruth Gentry (February 22, 1862 - October 15, 1917) grew up in Indiana and received her A.B. degree at Indiana State Normal (now Indiana State University) in 1880. After ten years of teaching at preparatory schools, she earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1890. She spent the following year as a Fellow in Mathematics at Bryn Mawr, then became the first mathematician and the second recipient of the Association of College Alumnae European Fellowship, which she used in 1891-92 to attend lectures at the University of Berlin (but was not allowed to enroll for a degree). After a further semester attending mathematics lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris, Gentry returned to Bryn Mawr to become one of Charlotte Scott's first two graduate students. She received her Ph.D. in 1896 on the topic "On the Forms of Plane Quartic Curves." As she writes at the beginning of this thesis:
"Many papers dealing with curves of the fourth order, or Quartic Curves, are to be found in the various mathematical periodicals; but these leave the actual appearance of the curve as a whole so largely to the reader's imagination that it is here proposed to give a complete enumeration of the fundamental forms of Plane Quartic Curves as they appear when projected so as to cut the line infinity the least possible number of times, together with evidence that the forms presented can exist."
Gentry taught at Vassar College from 1896 until 1902, where she was the first mathematics faculty member to hold a Ph.D. degree. She was promoted to associate professor in 1900, but left Vassar two years later to become the associate principal and head of the mathematics department at a private school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a position she held until 1905. After that she spent some time as a volunteer nurse and traveled in the United States and Europe, but she became increasingly ill and died at the age of 55. She was a member of the American Mathematical Society from 1894 until her death in 1917 in Indianapolis, Indiana. *Agnes Scott College web page

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1903 Frank Plumpton Ramsey (22 Feb 1903, 19 Jan 1930) English mathematician, logician and philosopher who died at age 26, but had already made significant contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language and decision theory. He remains noted for his Ramsey Theory, a mathematical study of combinatorial objects in which a certain degree of order must occur as the scale of the object becomes large. This theory spans various fields of mathematics, including combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. His papers show he was also a remarkably creative and subtle philosopher. *TIS His father Arthur, also a mathematician, was President of Magdalene College. His brother, Michael Ramsey, later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Suffering from chronic liver problems, Ramsey contracted jaundice after an abdominal operation and died on 19 January 1930 at Guy's Hospital in London at the age of 26. He is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge, UK.*Wik

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1928 BASIC co-inventor Thomas Kurtz is born. With John Kemeny, Kurtz developed the easy-to-learn programming language for his students at Dartmouth College in the early 1960s. He said: "If Fortran is the lingua franca ... BASIC is the lingua playpen." *CHM

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DEATHS

1512 Amerigo Vespucci (9 Mar 1451, 22 Feb 1512 at age 60)Spanish astronomer whose name was given to the New World - America - because it was he and not Columbus, who realized and announced that Columbus had discovered a new continent. *TIS

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1687 Francesco Lana de Terzi (Brescia, Lombardy 1631 – 22 February 1687 Brescia, Lombardy) was an Italian Jesuit, mathematician, naturalist and aeronautics pioneer. Having been professor of physics and mathematics at Brescia, he first sketched the concept for a vacuum airship and has been referred to as the Father of Aeronautics for his pioneering efforts, turning the aeronautics field into a science by establishing "a theory of aerial navigation verified by mathematical accuracy". He also developed the idea that developed into Braille. *Wik

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1901 George Francis FitzGerald (3 Aug 1851 in Kill-o'-the Grange, Monkstown, Co. Dublin, Ireland - 21 Feb 1901 in Dublin, Ireland) Irish physicist whose suggestion of a way to produce waves helped lay a foundation for wireless telegraphy. He also first developed a theory, independently discovered by Hendrik Lorentz, that a material object moving through an electromagnetic field would exhibit a contraction of its length in the direction of motion. This is now known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, which Einstein used in his own special theory of relativity. He also was first to propose the structure of comets as a head made of large stones, but a tail make of such smaller stones (less than 1-cm diam.) that the pressure of light radiation from the sun could deflect them. FitzGerald also studied electrolysis as well as electromagnetic radiation.*TIS

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1941 Dayton Clarence Miller (13 Mar 1866, 22 Feb 1941 at age 74)American physicist. Author of The Science of Musical Sounds (1916). Miller's collection of nearly 1,650 flutes and other instruments, and other materials mostly related to the flute, is now at the Library of Congress. To provide a mechanical means of recording sound waves photographically, he invented the phonodeik (1908). He became expert in architectural ecoustics. During WW I, he was consulted concerning using his photodeik to help locate enemy guns. Miller spent considerable research effort on repeating the Michelson and Morley experiment, proposed by Maxwell, to detect a stationary aether. He spent some time working with Morley (1902-4), then more time at Mt. Wilson, recording results favoring the presence of the aether.*TIS

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1975 Oskar Perron ( 7 May 1880 in Frankenthal, Pfalz, Germany - 22 Feb 1975 in Munich, Germany)was a German mathematician best known for the Perron paradox:
Suppose the largest natural number is N. Then if N is greater than 1 we have N2 greater than N contradicting the definition. His publications cover a wide range of mathematical topics. His work in analysis is certainly remembered through the Perron integral. However he also worked on differential equations, matrices and other topics in algebra, continued fractions, geometry and number theory. *SAU

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1984 Maxwell Herman Alexander "Max" Newman, FRS (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984) was a British mathematician and codebreaker. After WWII he continued to do research on combinatorial topology during a period when England was a major center of activity, notably Cambridge under the leadership of Christopher Zeeman. Newman made important contributions leading to an invitation to present his work at the 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm at the age of 65, and proved a Generalized Poincaré conjecture for topological manifolds in 1966. He died in Cambridge.*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

On This Day in Math - February 21

Durer Perspective

My mother said, "Even you, Paul, can be in only one place at one time." Maybe soon I will be relieved of this disadvantage. Maybe, once I've left, I'll be able to be in many places at the same time. Maybe then I'll be able to collaborate with Archimedes and Euclid.
~Paul Erdos

The 52nd day of the year; The month and day are simultaneously prime a total of 52 times in a non-leap year. *Tanya Khovanova, Number Gossip How many times in a leap year?
52 is also the maximum number of moves needed to solve the 15 puzzle from the worst possible start. *Mario Livio

There are 52 letters in the names of the cards in a standard deck: ACE KING QUEEN JACK TEN
(This also works in Spanish) *Futility Closet

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EVENTS

1632 Galileo's epic Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems is Published in Florence. After receiving, what Galileo viewed as permission to write about "the systems of the world" from the new pope, Urban VIII. Greeted with Praise from scholars across Europe, it would eventually be Galileo's downfall. *Brody & Brody, The Science Class You Wish You Had

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1699 Newton elected the second foreign member of the French Academy. See January 28, 1699. [American Journal of Physics, 34(1966), 22] *VFR Thony Christie points out in a comment (below) that "Newton was appointed foreign associate of the Académie Royale des Sciences along with four others so to claim he was the second is more than somewhat dubious." (My Thanks)

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1727/8 Isaac Greenwood began his “Publick” lectures at Harvard as the first Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. The lectures were open to the entire university. [I. B. Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science, p. 35.] *VFR

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1811, as Humphry Davy read a paper to the Royal Society, he introduced the name "chlorine" from the Greek word for "green," for the bright yellow green gas chemists then knew as oxymuriatic gas. In his paper, On a Combination of Oxymuriatic Gas and Oxygene Gas, Davy reported on his numerous experiments with oxymuratic gas, which appeared to have many of the reactive properties of oxygen. Hydrochloric acid was then known as muriatic acid, and when chlorine was first obtained from a reaction with the acid, the yellow green gas had been thought to be a compound containing oxygen. Later, Davy's careful work would show that the chlorine gas was in fact an element, unable to be decomposed into any simpler substances. *TIS

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1831 Michael Faraday in a letter to William Whewell regarding a recent publication by Whewell (Journal of the Royal Institution of England (1831), 437-453.), “Your remarks upon chemical notation with the variety of systems which have arisen, had almost stirred me up to regret publicly that such hindrances to the progress of science should exist. I cannot help thinking it a most unfortunate thing that men who as experimentalists, philosophers are the most fitted to advance the general cause of science; knowledge should by promulgation of their own theoretical views under the form of nomenclature, notation, or scale, actually retard its progress. *Isaac Todhunter, William Whewell, (1876), Vol. 1., 307.

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1845 The ship Charles Heddle sailed north from Mauritius and encountered a terrible storm. Striking sails and scudding before the wind they proceeded four times around the center in clockwise loops hundreds of miles wide. After six days a clearing sky allowed the Captain to take a reading and realize that as they circled, they had also been driven back nearly to their starting point. Reading the log of the Charles Heddle and other reports of this storm, Henry Piddington coined the word cyclone, from the Greek for "coils of a snake,". After he used the term in his "The Sailor's Horn-Book for the Law of Storms" it became a common term.

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1908 Birthdate of Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix, the greatest numerologist who (n)ever lived. At the age of seven he astonished his minister Father when he pointed out that 8 is the holiest number of all: “The other numbers with holes are 0, 6, and 9, and sometimes 4, but 8 has two holes, therefore it is the holiest.” Martin Gardner first drew attention to Dr. Matrix in his January 1960 column “Mathematical Games,” in Scientific American. For more details, see The Incredible Dr. Matrix, by Martin Gardner [p. 3-4]. *VFR

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1953, Francis Crick and James Watson reached their conclusion about the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. They made their first announcement on Feb 28, and their paper, A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, was published in the 25 Apr 1953 issue of journal Nature. *TIS

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1996 Cox Enterprises announces it was buying a one-third interest in Digital Domain, a computer-generated special effects company, in order to heighten the use of special effects in media. The deal reflected "another step in the rapid convergence of various computer, software, entertainment and media companies," The New York Times wrote. *CHM

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2012 The engineering profession's highest honors for 2012, presented by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), recognize ground-breaking contributions to the development of the modern liquid crystal display and achievements that led to a curriculum that encourages engineering leadership. The awards, announced today, will be presented at a gala dinner event in Washington, DC on February 21, 2012.
George H. Heilmeier, Wolfgang Helfrich, Martin Schadt, and T. Peter Brody will receive the Charles Stark Draper Prize a $500,000 annual award that honors engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society "for the engineering development of the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) that is utilized in billions of consumer devices." *AAAS/Science Newsletter, January 19, 2012

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BIRTHS

1591 Girard Desargues (21 Feb 1591 in Lyon, France - ? Sept 1661 in Lyon, France) He did noted work in projective geometry. *VFR Desargues' most important work, the one in which he invented his new form of geometry, has the title Rough draft for an essay on the results of taking plane sections of a cone (Brouillon project d'une atteinte aux evenemens des rencontres du Cone avec un Plan). A small number of copies was printed in Paris in 1639. Only one is now known to survive, and until this was rediscovered, in 1951, Desargues' work was known only through a manuscript copy made by Philippe de la Hire (1640 - 1718). The book is short, but very dense. It begins with pencils of lines and ranges of points on a line, considers involutions of six points (Desargues does not use or define a cross ratio), gives a rigorous treatment of cases involving 'infinite' distances, and then moves on to conics, showing that they can be discussed in terms of properties that are invariant under projection. We are given a unified theory of conics.
Desargues' famous 'perspective theorem' - that when two triangles are in perspective the meets of corresponding sides are collinear - was first published in 1648, in a work on perspective by Abraham Bosse. *SAU

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1764 Ruan Yuan (Chinese characters: 阮元) (21 Feb 1764 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, China - 27 Nov 1849 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, China), was a scholar official in the Qing Dynasty in Imperial China. He won jinshi (high) honors in the imperial examinations in 1789 and was subsequently appointed to the Hanlin Academy. He was famous for his work Biographies of Astronomers and Mathematicians and for his editing the Shi san jing zhu shu (Commentaries and Notes on the Thirteen Classics) for the Qing emperor.*Wik

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1849 Édouard Gaston (Daniel) Deville (21 Feb 1849; 21 Sep 1924 at age 75)
was a French-Canadian surveyor was a French-born Canadian surveyor of Canadian lands (1875-1924) who perfected the first practical method of photogrammetry, or the making of maps based on photography. His system used projective grids of images taken from photographs made with a camera and theodolite mounted on the same tripod. Photographs were taken from different locations, at precise predetermined angles, with measured elevations. Each photograph slightly overlapped the preceding one. With enough photographs and points of intersection, a map could be prepared, including contour lines. He also invented (1896) the first stereoscopic plotting instrument called the Stereo-Planigraph, though its complexity resulted in little use. *TIS

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1915 Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz FRS (February 21, 1915 – October 29, 1985) was a leading Soviet physicist of Jewish origin and the brother of physicist Ilya Mikhailovich Lifshitz. (Some commonly encountered alternative transliterations of his names include Yevgeny or Evgenii and Lifshits or Lifschitz.) Lifshitz is well known in general relativity for coauthoring the BKL conjecture concerning the nature of a generic curvature singularity. As of 2006, this is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in the subject of classical gravitation.
With Lev Landau, Lifshitz co-authored Course of Theoretical Physics, an ambitious series of physics textbooks, in which the two aimed to provide a graduate-level introduction to the entire field of physics. These books are still considered invaluable and continue to be widely used. Landau's wife strongly criticized his scientific abilities, hinting at how much of their joint work was done by Lifshitz and how much by Landau. Despite the sniping, he is well known for many invaluable contributions, in particular to quantum electrodynamics, where he calculated the Casimir force in an arbitrary macroscopic configuration of metals and dielectrics.*Wik

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DEATHS

1900 Charles Piazzi Smyth FRSE FRS FRAS FRSSA (3 January 1819, Naples, Italy – 21 February 1900), was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1846 to 1888, well known for many innovations in astronomy and his pyramidological and metrological studies of the Great Pyramid of Giza. *Wik

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1901 George Francis Fitzgerald (3 Aug 1851, 21 Feb 1901 at age 49) Irish physicist whose suggestion of a way to produce waves helped lay a foundation for wireless telegraphy. He also first developed a theory, independently discovered by Hendrik Lorentz, that a material object moving through an electromagnetic field would exhibit a contraction of its length in the direction of motion. This is now known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, which Einstein used in his own special theory of relativity. He also was first to propose the structure of comets as a head made of large stones, but a tail make of such smaller stones (less than 1-cm diam.) that the pressure of light radiation from the sun could deflect them. FitzGerald also studied electrolysis as well as electromagnetic radiation.*TIS

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1912  Émile Michel Hyacinthe Lemoine (22 Nov 1840 in Quimper, France - 21 Feb 1912 in Paris, France) Lemoine work in mathematics was mainly on geometry. He founded a

new study of properties of a triangle in a paper of 1873 where he studied the point of intersection of the symmedians of a triangle. He had been a founder member of the Association Française pour l'Avancement des Sciences and it was at a meeting of the Association in 1873 in Lyon that he presented his work on the symmedians.
A symmedian of a triangle from vertex A is obtained by reflecting the median from A in the bisector of the angle A. He proved that the symmedians are concurrent, the point where they meet now being called the Lemoine point. Among other results on symmedians in Lemoine's 1873 paper is the result that the symmedian from the vertex A cuts the side BC of the triangle in the ratio of the squares of the sides AC and AB. He also proved that if parallels are drawn through the Lemoine point parallel to the three sides of the triangle then the six points lie on a circle, now called the Lemoine circle. Its centre is at the mid-point of the line joining the Lemoine point to the circumcentre of the triangle. Lemoine gave up active mathematical research in 1895 but continued to support the subject. He had helped to found a mathematical journal, L'intermédiaire des mathématiciens., in 1894 and he became its first editor, a role he held for many years. *SAU   His mathematical recreation books are still popular in France.

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1912 Osborne Reynolds (23 Aug 1842 in Belfast, Ireland - 21 Feb 1912 in Watchet, Somerset, England) was an Irish mathematician best known for introducing the Reynolds number classifying fluid flow.*SAU

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1926 Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (21 Sep 1853, 21 Feb 1926 at age 72)Dutch physicist who was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on low-temperature physics in which he liquified hydrogen and helium. From his studies of the resistance of metals at low temperatures, he discovered superconductivity (a state in which certain metals exhibit almost no electrical resistance at a temperature near absolute zero).*TIS

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1932 James Mercer FRS (15 January 1883 – 21 February 1932) was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England. He was educated at University of Manchester, and then University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow, saw active service at the Battle of Jutland in World War I, and after decades of suffering ill health died in London, England.
He proved Mercer's theorem, which states that positive definite kernels can be expressed as a dot product in a high-dimensional space. This theorem is the basis of the kernel trick (applied by Aizerman), which allows linear algorithms to be easily converted into non-linear algorithms. *Wik

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1938 George Ellery Hale (29 Jun 1868, 21 Feb 1938 at age 69). U S astronomer known for his development of important astronomical instruments. To expand solar observations and promote astrophysical studies he founded Mt. Wilson Observatory (Dec 1904). He discovered that sunspots were regions of relatively low temperatures and high magnetic fields. Hale hired Harlow Shapley and Edwin Hubble as soon as they finished their doctorates, and he encouraged research in galactic and extragalactic astronomy as well as solar and stellar astrophysics. Hale planned and tirelessly raised funds for the 200-inch reflecting telescope at the Palomar Mountain Observatory completed in 1948, after his death, and named for him—the Hale telescope. *TIS

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1962 Julio Rey Pastor (14 August 1888 – 21 February 1962) was a Spanish mathematician and historian of science. Rey proposed the creation of a "seminar in mathematics to arouse the research spirit of our school children.” His proposal was accepted and in 1915 the JAE created the Mathematics Laboratory and Seminar, an important institution for the development of research on this field in Spain.
In 1951, he was appointed director of the Instituto Jorge Juan de Matemáticas in the CSIC. His plans in Spain included two projects: the creation, within the CSIC, of an Institute of Applied Mathematics, and the foundation of a Seminar on the History of Science at the university. *Wik

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1996 Hans-Joachim Bremermann​ (14 Sept 1926 in Bremen, Germany - 21 Feb 1996 in Berkeley, California, USA) was a German-American mathematician and biophysicist. He worked on computer science and evolution, introducing new ideas of how mating generates new gene combinations. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.*Wik

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2009 Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (30 March 1929 – 21 February 2009) was a Russian-Jewish mathematician. During a career that spanned 60 years he made major contributions to applied science as well as theoretical mathematics. In the last forty years his research focused on pure mathematics; in particular, analytic number theory, group representations and algebraic geometry. His main contribution and impact was in the area of automorphic forms and L-functions.
For the last 30 years of his life he suffered from Parkinson's disease. However, with the help of his wife Edith, he was able to continue to work and do mathematics at the highest level, even when he was barely able to walk and speak.*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

A Beautiful Triangle Relation, with an unexpected twist.

It started with a tweet from John Golden@mathhombre who put me on to this beautiful recent discovery by Lee Sallows that he found at the Futility Closet blog, a veritable cornucopia of interesting posts.
So first the details, and then my discovery (although I can't imagine I was the first, but then things like the neat little idea below just lay there for centuries waiting to be found, so who knows?)

Lee Sallows recently published (Dec 2014)in Mathematics Magazine his discovery of the following:

It starts with the standard high school construction of the medians of a triangle meeting in a point, a regular feature of most high school classes. If you then take the six small triangles in pairs as shown, and rotate them about the three midpoints of the original sides, you get three triangles.... three CONGRUENT triangles, but in general, none of which is similar to the original.

Now if the original is equilateral, then so will the three triplets, and if they are isosceles, then so will the triplets... but NOT with the same vertex angle. For example if you start with a 4,4,6 isosceles triangle (vertex angle = appx. 97^o), then the newly created triangles will have a vertex angle of about 37.5^o, and both base angles are much larger.
I harbored a conjecture when I began that each new generation of triangles would work themselves toward an equilateral triangle as a limiting case, but this seemed to make that unlikely, one angle had jumped from being obtuse to well smaller than a 60 degree angle.
Confused, I decided to pursue what would happen if we took one of these smaller congruent triangles and applied this process again.
I will give some of the process here in the hopes that it will make it easier to follow.

It is easy to show they are congruent, although it fooled me for a minute because they are all in different orientations.   If you are familiar with the properties of the medians, you are well aware that the medians intersect each other at a point which is 2/3 of the way from the vertex to the midpoint of the opposite side. Studying the diagram, you can see that each side of the new triangle will be 2/3 of one of the medians (two copies of the 1/3 of a median next to the midpoint, and two sides of 2/3 of a median from the vertices). For convenience we will call the median to the midpoint of a, m_a and similarly the other two will be m_b and m_c.

There is actually a somewhat easily remembered formula for the lengths of each median based on the lengths of the three sides. \( m_a = 1/2 (\sqrt{2b^2 + 2c^2-a^2}) \) and similarly for each of the others. Using 6 as side a we arrive at \( m_a = \sqrt{7} \). The other two medians are both \( \sqrt{22} \) . This would make the three triplets, have sides of  \( ( \frac{2 \sqrt{7}}{3} , \frac{2 \sqrt{22}}{3}, and \frac{2 \sqrt{22}}{3} ) \).

Now if we use these as sides a', b', and c' we could run them through the same process, and get the medians of \( \Delta A'B'C'\) , which I proceeded to do. And the base of the isosceles triangle turns out to be ..... 3... yep, .....but not just plain old 3, but 3 like 1/2 of six. And when I did the isosceles sides they turn out to be 2. These are the medians of the first generation of triplets, so 2/3 of these medians should be the sides of our second generation triplets. Sides of 2, 4/3 and 4/3.... all exactly one third of our original triangle. The second generation of triplets were not only congruent to each other, but they were also similar to the original triangle with sides 1/3 as long.

Now there was only one question left to figure out... WHY?

After a break for some thinking (and a piece of chocolate cream pie) it hit me.

If you look at the figure above, (or John's illustrations below which I just received as I'm writing) focus for a moment on the two blue triangles and call the side of the triangle below them side a. Now when the hinge is opened, the two halves of this edge come together to make the seam of this one of the triplet. But look hard, these two a/2 halves form a median of the triplet.
Now look again at the original triangle (so I don't have to draw so many figures) and think of the median from the hinge between the two blue triangles up to the opposite vertex as a/2. When that is broken into second generation triplets, the part of the median between the two blue triangles running up to the concurrency point, is 1/3 of a/2, or a/6 in length. Now when the hinge is opened out, two copies of this will form a side of the second generation triplet, twice as long as a/6, or a/3.
Now we could have done all this hand waving starting with side b or c, and arrived at b/3 or c/3.

As I was working on this, I exchanged a few tweets with John and he was working on some Geogebra sketches, one of which I think makes the evolution of each generation really clear.

 The original pink \( \Delta \) ABC with the blue triangle  \(\Delta \)BGG' , made up of BGF and the rotation of  \(\Delta \)AGF  to become \(\Delta \)AG'F  as the first generation triplet on side c.  This is then trisected and the next generation is \(\Delta \) G'I I' which is a 1/3 dilation of the original rotated 180^o

It had to be the chocolate pie (and John's help). I would never have figured it out otherwise.  My thanks to John for both the intro to the problem, and the neat Geogebra graphics. 

On This Day in Math - February 20

A mathematician will recognise Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognise, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert.
~Ludwig Boltzmann

The 51st day of the year; 51 is the number of different paths from (0,0) to (6,0) made up of segments connecting lattice points that can only have slopes of 1, 0, or -1 but so that they never go below the x-axis. These are called Motzkin Numbers.

EVENTS

1648 A letter from Fermat through Frenicle to Digby reached Wallis saying that Fermat had solve equations of the type x²-Ay² = 1 for all non-square values up to 150. Thus begins the saga of the mis-naming of Pell's equation. *Edward Everett Whitford, The Pell Equation

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1729 A Letter from Gabriel Cramer, Prof. Math. Genev. to James Jurin, M. D. and F. R. S. to be read at the Royal Society, gives an “account of an Aurora Borealis Attended with Unusual Appearances” . The borealis occurred on Feb 15, and the letter was sent on Feb 20. *Transactions of RSI

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In 1835, Charles Darwin, on his H.M.S. Beagle voyage reached Chile, and experienced a very strong earthquake and shortly afterward saw evidence of several feet of uplift in the region. He repeated measurement a few days later, and found the land had risen several feet. He had proved that geological changes occur even in our own time. Lyell's principles were based on the concept of a steady-state, nondirectional earth whereby uplift, subsidence, erosion, and deposition were all balanced. Thereby, Darwin coupled in his mind this dramatic evidence of elevation with accompanying subsidence and deposition. Thus he hypothesized that coral reefs of the Pacific developed on the margins of subsiding land masses, in the three stages of fringing reef, barrier reef, and atoll.*TIS

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1913 It was on, or around, this day that the Three Sisters Radio towers near Arlington, Va went into service. In an area called Radio, near the Columbia Pike and Courthouse Road. Virginia. It was a neighborhood named for the old U.S. Navy Wireless Station. The tallest of the three towers was 45 feet taller than the Washington Monument, and second only to the Eiffel Tower in the world.

The Navy opened Radio Arlington, call sign NAA, in 1913, launching the U.S. military’s global communications system on Fort Myers. A streetcar stop was even named “Radio.’’ Old Radio Arlington marked the first time the term “radio’’ was used in communications, according to Nan and Ross Netherton’s book “Arlington County in Virginia: A Pictorial History,” which was published in 1987. In the days of Marconi and other radio pioneers, the new communications mode was called “wireless telegraphy.’’

*The 625 Sentinal

At Tenwatts Blog I found that there is a marker outside the present Dept. of Defense facility there:

"Three radio towers similar to the Eiffel tower were erected here in 1913. One stood 600 feet, and the other two 450 feet above the 200-foot elevation of the site. The word "radio" was first used instead of "wireless" in the name of this naval communications facility. The first trans-Atlantic voice communication was made between this station and the Eiffel tower in 1915. The nation set its clocks by the Arlington Radio time signal and listened for its broadcast weather reports. The towers were dismantled in 1941, as a menace to aircraft approaching the new Washington National Airport."

I also found the nice postcard showing the three sisters (and some additions) taken from Arlington National Cemetery. His post suggests that the towers were eventually dismantled.

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1947 Computer pioneer Alan Turing suggests testing artificial intelligence with the game of chess in a lecture to the London Mathematical Society. Computers, he argued, must like humans be given training before their IQ is tested. A human mathematician has always undergone an extensive training. This training may be regarded as not unlike putting instruction tables into a machine, he said. One must therefore not expect a machine to do a very great deal of building up of instruction tables on its own.*CHM

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1966 The only verified example of a family producing five single children with coincidental birthdays is that of Catherine (1952), Coral (1953), Charles (1956), Claudia (1961), and Cecelia (1966), born to Ralph and Carolyn Cummins of Clintwood, VA. All on Feb 20th.  What is the probability of this happening? *VFR (RALPH? He should have changed his name.)

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1979 The German Democratic Republic issued a stamp commemorating the centenary of Einstein’s birth. It shows the Einstein tower in Potsdam and his famous formula E = mc². [Scott #1990]*VFR

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In 1996, a bright "new" star was discovered in Sagittarius by Japanese amateur astronomer Yukio Sakurai. It was found not to be a usual nova, but instead was a star going through a dramatic evolutionary state, re-igniting its nuclear furnace for one final blast of energy called the "final helium flash." It was only the second to be identified in the twentieth century. A star like the Sun ends its active life as a white dwarf star gradually cooling down into visual oblivion. Sakurai's Object had a mass a few times that of the Sun. Its collapse after fusing most of its hydrogen fuel to helium raised its temperature so much higher it began nuclear fusion of its helium remains. This was confirmed using its light spectrum to identify the elements present.*TIS

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2013 In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of the three-volume version of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, a London theater company staged the world premiere of a musical based on the epic mathematics text.
Performed by the Conway Collective based out of London's historic Conway Hall and written by Tyrone Landau, the play was described as "fascinating and unusual." *MAA DL

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BIRTHS

1844 Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (February 20, 1844 – September 5, 1906) was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was one of the most important advocates for atomic theory at a time when that scientific model was still highly controversial. *Wik Trivia: Boltzmann's famous equation S = K log W (where S = entropy, K = Boltzmann's constant, and W = probability of a particular state) was inscribed as an epitaph on Boltzmann's tombstone. *Wik After obtaining his doctorate, he became an assistant to his teacher Josef Stefan. Boltzmann's fame is based on his invention of statistical mechanics, independently of Willard Gibbs. Their theories connected the properties and behaviour of atoms and molecules with the large scale properties and behaviour of the substances of which they were the building blocks. He also worked out a kinetic theory of gases, and the Stefan-Boltzmann law concerning a relationship between the temperature of a body and the radiation it emits. His firm belief and defense of atomism (that all matter is made of atoms) against hostile opposition to this new idea, may have contributed to his suicide in 1906. *TIS

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1860 Mathias Lerch​ (20 February 1860, Milínov - 3 August 1922, Schüttenhofen) was an eminent Czech mathematician who published about 250 papers, largely on mathematical analysis and number theory. He studied in Prague and Berlin, and held teaching positions at the Czech Technical Institute in Prague, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the Czech Technical Institute in Brno, and Masaryk University in Brno; he was the first mathematics professor at Masaryk University when it was founded in 1920. In 1900, he was awarded the Grand Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his number-theoretic work. The Lerch zeta-function is named after him as is the Appell–Lerch sum.*Wik

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1926 Kenneth Harry Olsen (February 20, 1926 – February 6, 2011) was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson *Wik

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1929 Madan Lal Puri ( Sialkot in Pakistan , 20 February 1929 ) is a statistical Indian important in the context of nonparametric statistics and also occupied the fuzzy sets .*Wik

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1931 John Willard Milnor (20 Feb 1931, )American mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1962 for his his proof that a 7-dimensional sphere can have 28 different differential structures. This work opened up the new field of differential topology. Milnor's theorem shows that the total curvature of a knot is at least 4. In the 1950's, Milnor did a substantial amount of work on algebraic topology in which he constructed the classifying space of a topological group and gave a geometric realisation of a semi-simplicial complex. Since the 1970's his interest is in dynamics, especially holomorphic dynamics. Milnor served the American Mathematical Society as vice president (1975-76) and was awarded the Wolf Prize in 1989. *TIS

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1948 Andrew Christopher Fabian, OBE, FRS (20 February 1948 - ) is a British astronomer and astrophysicist. He is a Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and Vice-Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. He was the President of the Royal Astronomical Society from May 2008 through to 2010. He is an Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, a position in which he delivered free public lectures within the City of London between 1982 and 1984. He was also editor-in-chief of the astronomy journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was educated at King's College London (BSc, Physics) and University College London (PhD).
His current areas of research include galaxy clusters, active galactic nuclei, strong gravity, black holes and the X-ray background. He has also worked on X-ray binaries, neutron stars and supernova remnants in the past. Much of his research involves X-ray astronomy and high energy astrophysics. His notable achievements include his involvement in the discovery of broad iron lines emitted from active galactic nuclei, for which he was jointly awarded the Bruno Rossi Prize. He is author of over 800 refereed articles and head of the X-ray astronomy group at the Institute of Astronomy. Fabian was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics by the American Astronomical Society in 2008 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2012 *Wik

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DEATHS

1762 Tobias Meyer (17 Feb 1723; 20 Feb 1762 at age 38) German astronomer who developed lunar tables that greatly assisted navigators in determining longitude at sea. Mayer also discovered the libration (or apparent wobbling) of the Moon. Mayer began calculating lunar and solar tables in 1753 and in 1755 he sent them to the British government. These tables were good enough to determine longitude at sea with an accuracy of half a degree. Mayer's method of determining longitude by lunar distances and a formula for correcting errors in longitude due to atmospheric refraction were published in 1770 after his death. The Board of Longitude sent Mayer's widow a payment of 3000 pounds as an award for the tables. *TIS Leonhard Euler described him as 'undoubtedly the greatest astronomer in Europe'. More notes on Meyer can be found on this blog at the Board of Longitude Project from the Royal Museums at Greenwich. Another nice blog by Thony Christie, The Renaissance Mathematicus tells of Meyer's measurement of the Moon's distance, and the importance of that measurement.

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1778 Laura Maria Catarina Bassi (31 Oct 1711 in Bologna, Papal States, 20 Feb 1778 in Bologna, Papal States) was an Italian physicist and one of the earliest women to gain a position in an Italian university. *SAU She was the first woman in the world to earn a university chair in a scientific field of studies. She received a doctoral degree from the University of Bologna in May 1732, only the third academic qualification ever bestowed on a woman by a European university, and the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe. She was the first woman to be offered an official teaching position at a university in Europe.
In 1738, she married Giuseppe Veratti, a fellow academic with whom she had twelve children. After this, she was able to lecture from home on a regular basis and successfully petitioned the University for more responsibility and a higher salary to allow her to purchase her own equipment.
One of her principal patrons was Pope Benedict XIV. He supported less censorship of scholarly work, such as happened with Galileo, and he supported women figures in learning, including Agnesi.
She was mainly interested in Newtonian physics and taught courses on the subject for 28 years. She was one of the key figures in introducing Newton's ideas of physics and natural philosophy to Italy. She also carried out experiments of her own in all aspects of physics. In order to teach Newtonian physics and Franklinian electricity, topics that were not focused in the university curriculum, Bassi gave private lessons.[6] In her lifetime, she authored 28 papers, the vast majority of these on physics and hydraulics, though she did not write any books. She published only four of her papers.[2] Although only a limited number of her scientific works were left behind, much of her scientific impact is evident through her many correspondents including Voltaire, Francesco Algarotti, Roger Boscovich, Charles Bonnet, Jean Antoine Nollet, Giambattista Beccaria, Paolo Frisi, Alessandro Volta. Voltaire once wrote to her saying "There is no Bassi in London, and I would be much happier to be added to your Academy of Bologna than that of the English, even though it has produced a Newton". *Wik

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1928 Antonio Abetti (19 Jun 1846, 20 Feb 1928 at age 81) Italian astronomer who was an authority on minor planets. At first a civil engineer, he became an astronomer at the University of Padua (1868-93), with an interest in positional astronomy and made many observations of small planets, comets and star occultations. In 1874, Abetti went to Muddapur, Bengal, to observe the transit of Venus across the sun's disk where his use of a spectroscope was the first use of this kind. Later, he became director at the Arcetri Observatory and Professor of astronomy at the University of Florence (1894-1921). The observatory had been founded by G. B. Donati in 1872, and Abetti equipped it with a new telescope that he had built in the workshops at Padua. He was active after retirement, until his death, and was followed by his son Giorgio.*TIS

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1955 Arthur Lee Dixon FRS (27 November 1867 — 20 February 1955) was a British mathematician and holder of the Waynflete Professorship of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford. The younger brother of Alfred Cardew Dixon, he was educated at Kingswood School and Worcester College, Oxford, becoming a Tutorial Fellow at Merton College in 1898 and the Waynflete Professor in 1922. Dixon was the last mathematical professor at Oxford to hold a life tenure, and although he was not particularly noted for his mathematical innovations he did publish many papers on analytic number theory and the application of algebra to geometry, elliptic functions and hyperelliptic functions. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1912 and serving as President of the London Mathematical Society from 1924 to 1926, *Wik

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1972 Maria Goeppert-Mayer (28 Jun 1906, 20 Feb 1972 at age 65) German physicist who shared one-half of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen of West Germany for their proposal of the shell nuclear model. (The other half of the prize was awarded to Eugene P. Wigner of the United States for unrelated work.) In 1939 she worked at Columbia University on the separation of uranium isotopes for the atomic bomb project. In 1949, she devised the shell nuclear model, which explained the detailed properties of atomic nuclei in terms of a structure of shells occupied by the protons and neutrons. This explained the great stability and abundance of nuclei that have a particular number of neutrons (such as 50, 82, or 126) and the same special number of protons. *TIS

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2005 Esther (Klein) Szekeres (20 February 1910 – 28 August 2005) was a Hungarian–Australian mathematician with an Erdős number of 1. She was born to Ignaz Klein in a Jewish family in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary in 1910. As a young woman in Budapest, Klein was a member of a group of Hungarians including Paul Erdős, George Szekeres and Paul Turán that convened over interesting mathematical problems.
In 1933, Klein proposed to the group a combinatorial problem that Erdős named as the Happy Ending problem as it led to her marriage to George Szekeres in 1937, with whom she had two children.
Following the outbreak of World War II, Esther and George Szekeres emigrated to Australia after spending several years in Hongkew, a community of refugees located in Shanghai, China. In Australia, they originally settled in Adelaide before moving to Sydney in the 1960s.
In Sydney, Esther lectured at Macquarie University and was actively involved in mathematics enrichment for high-school students. In 1984, she jointly founded a weekly mathematics enrichment meeting that has since expanded into a program of about 30 groups that continue to meet weekly and inspire high school students throughout Australia and New Zealand.
In 2004, she and George moved back to Adelaide, where, on 28 August 2005, she and her husband passed away within an hour of each other *Wik

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2005 Edward Maitland Wright (13 Feb 1906 in Farnley, near Leeds, England - 2 Feb 2005 in Reading, England) was initially self-taught in Mathematics but was able to go and study at Oxford. He spent a year at Göttingen and returned to Oxford. He was appointed to the Char at Aberdeen where he stayed for the rest of his career, eventually becoming Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University. He is best known for the standard work on Number Theory he wrote with G H Hardy. One of Wright's first papers, published in 1930, was on Bernstein polynomials. Also among his early work was a series of three papers titled Asymptotic partition formulae. The third in the series Asymptotic partition formulae, III. Partitions into kth powers was published by Acta Mathematica in 1934. *SAU

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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