| Andromeda Galaxy which Hubble measured to be 300,000 parsecs away. |
Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.
~John Arbuthnot
The 58th day of the year; 58 is the sum of the first seven prime numbers.
It is the fourth smallest Smith Number. (Find the first three. A Smith number is a composite number for which the sum of its digits equals the sum of the digits in its prime factorization, including repetition. 58 = 2*29, and 5+8= 2+2+9.) Smith numbers were named by Albert Wilansky of Lehigh University. He noticed the property in the phone number (493-7775) of his brother-in-law Harold Smith.
If you take the number 2, square it, and continue to take the sum of the squares of the digits of the previous answer, you get the sequence 2, 4, 16, 37, 58, 89, 145, 42, 20, 4, and then it repeats. See what happens if you start with other values than 2, and see if you can find one that doesn't produce 58.
The Greeks knew 220 and 284 were Amicable in 300 BCE. By 1638 two more pairs had been added. Then, in two papers in 1747 and 1750 in a single paper, Euler added 58 more. He, and everyone else, missed the second smallest, (1184, 1210), was discovered in 1867 by 16-year-old B. Nicolò I. Paganini.
425 "University" or Pandidakterion of Constantinople Founded on this date by Theodosius II. It is described as "the first deliberate effort of the Byzantine state to impose its control on matters relating to higher education." *Wik *Medieval History @medievalhistory
1477 Founding of the University of Uppsala. A research university in Uppsala, Sweden, and is the oldest university in Sweden and Northern Europe. It ranks among the best universities in Northern Europe and is generally considered one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in Europe. Prominent students include Carolus Linnaeus , the father of taxonomy; Anders Celsius, inventor of the centigrade scale, and Niklas Zennström, co-founder of KaZaA and Skype. *Wik
The University celebrates the 300th anniversary of its reopening in 1893.
In 1611, Johannes Fabricius, a Dutch astronomer, observed the rising sun through his telescope, and observed several dark spots on it. This was one of the earliest observation of sunspots through a telescope. (Harriot, Galileo, and Christoph Scheiner all observed sunspots in the 1610-1611 period) . He called his father to investigate this new phenomenon with him. The brightness of the Sun's center was very painful, and the two quickly switched to a projection method by means of a camera obscura. Johannes was the first to publish information on such observations. He did so in his Narratio de maculis in sole observatis et apparente earum cum sole conversione. ("Narration on Spots Observed on the Sun and their Apparent Rotation with the Sun"), the dedication of which was dated 13 Jun 1611. *TIS "One irony of the history of astronomy is that Kepler, the only person to acknowledge Johann’s priority in publication had himself observed a large sunspot in 1607 with a camera obscura, a name that he coined, but mistakenly thought he was observing a transit of Mercury." *The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
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| monument churchyard at Osteel |
1665 Huygens writes letter to Robert Moray at the Royal Society asking him to pass on his "miraculous" observation of a synchronizing of his pendulum clocks. *Steven Strogatz, Synch
1753 James Sadler (Baptized 27 Feb 1753; died 26 Mar 1828 at age 75.)British balloonist, self educated pastry chef, and chemist who was the first English aeronaut, whose first successful ascent was on 4 Oct 1784, in a hot-air balloon, from Christ Church Meadow, Oxford. He rose to an estimated 3600 feet and travelled six miles. He made a 20-minute hydrogen balloon flight the next month, on 12 Nov 1784. By the time he attempted a crossing of St. George's Channel from Ireland, on 1 Oct 1812, he had made about sixty ascents. Almost reaching land, success eluded him when due to a change of wind he ditched in the sea off Liverpool. After some time in the water, he was rescued by a fishing boat. His two sons, John and Wyndham also took up ballooning. Wyndham successfully made the Irish Sea crossing from Dublin to Holyhead on 22 Jul 1817. (He fell from his balloon 29 Sep 1824, and died the next day.) *TIS
A view of the balloon of Mr. Sadler's ascending. Print illustrating Sadler's ascent on 12 August 1811.
1851 George Merriweather gave a nearly three-hour essay to members of the Philosophical Society entitled "Essay explanatory of the Tempest Prognosticator." The tempest prognosticator, also known as the leech barometer, is a 19th-century invention by Merryweather in which leeches are used in a barometer. The twelve leeches are kept in small bottles inside the device; when they become agitated by an approaching storm they attempt to climb out of the bottles and trigger a small hammer which strikes a bell. The likelihood of a storm is indicated by the number of times the bell is struck.
Merriweather was inspired by two lines from Edward Jenner's poem Signs of Rain: "The leech disturbed is newly risen; Quite to the summit of his prison." Merryweather spent much of 1850 developing his ideas and came up with six designs, the most expensive design, which took inspiration from the architecture of Indian temples, was made by local craftsmen and shown in the 1851 Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in London. Merryweather stated in his essay the great success that he had had with the device. It was never very popular, although on its centennial there was a brief rush of renewed interest. *Wik
1890 Dedekind’s second letter to Keferstein. Hans Keferstein had published a paper on the notion of number with comments and suggestions for change of Dedekind's 1888 book. Dedekind first responded on February 9, and on February 14 and announced that he would push the publication by the "Society". It was in the letter of February 27 that Dedekind gives what is called, "a brilliant presentation of the development of his ideas on the notion of natural number." *Jean Van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel: a source book in mathematical logic, 1879-1931, pg 98 The text of the letter is available on-line at Google Books
1919 Ramanujan sailed to India on 27 February 1919 arriving on 13 March. However his health was very poor and, despite medical treatment, he died there the following year.
Ramanujan had sailed from India on 17 March 1914. It was a calm voyage except for three days on which Ramanujan was seasick. Ramanujan fell seriously ill in 1917 and his doctors feared that he would die. He did improve a little by September but spent most of his time in various nursing homes. After a brief improvement, his illness rebounded and it was decided to return to India. Not quite five years in England. *MacTutor
1924, Harlow Shapley replied to a letter from Edwin Hubble which presented the measurement of 300,000 parsecs as the distance to the Andromeda nebula. That was the first proof that the nebula was far outside the Milky Way, in fact, a separate galaxy. When Shapley had debated Heber Curtis on 26 Apr 1920, he presented his firm, life-long conviction that all the Milky Way represented the known universe (and, for instance, the Andromeda nebula was part of the Milky Way.) On receipt of the letter, Shapley told Payne-Gaposchkin and said “Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe.” In his reply, Shapley said sarcastically that Hubble's letter was “the most entertaining piece of literature I have seen for a long time.” Hubble sent more data in a paper to the AAS meeting, read on 1 Jan 1925. *TIS
1936 France issued a stamp with a portrait (by Louis Boilly) of Andr´e-Marie Amp`ere (1775–1836) to honor the centenary of his death. [Scott #306] *VFR
1940 Carbon-14 was discovered on 27 February 1940, by Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Its existence had been suggested by Franz Kurie in 1934. There are three naturally occurring isotopes of carbon on Earth: 99% of the carbon is carbon-12, 1% is carbon-13, and carbon-14 occurs in trace amounts, i.e., making up about 1 or 1.5 atoms per 1012 atoms of the carbon in the atmosphere. The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730±40 years.
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years old. The technique was developed by Willard Libby and his colleagues in 1949. Wik
1942, J.S. Hey discovered radio emissions from the Sun. *TIS Several prior attempts were made to detect radio emission from the Sun by experimenters such as Nikola Tesla and Oliver Lodge, but those attempts were unable to detect any emission due to technical limitations of their instruments. Jansky first thought the radio signals he picked up from space were from the sun. *Wik
Hey used radar to track the paths of V-2 rockets approaching London at about 100 miles high, aiming to be able to predict their point of impact. He noticed spasmodic transient radar echoes at heights of about 60 miles, arriving at a rate of five to 10 per hour. When the V-2 attacks ceased, the echoes did not; Hey concluded that meteor trails were responsible and that radar could be used to track meteor streams, and could of course do so by day as well as by night. When he tried to increase the sensitivity of his radar in order to track V-2s from a greater distance, he rediscovered the cosmic radio noise that Karl Jansky and Grote Reber had found in the 1930s.
Hey's results of 1942 and 1944 could not be published until after the war. From 1945 to 1947, Hey used AORG's radars in Richmond Park to research his wartime radio astronomical discoveries further. The Richmond Park installation thus effectively became the first radio observatory in Britain.
1989 In a review of Einstein–Bessso correspondence in the New Yorker, Jeremy Bernstein wrote: “In 1909, Einstein accepted a job as an associate professor at the University of Zurich, ... Einstein makes a familiar academic complaint—that because of his teaching duties he has less free time than when he was examining patents for eight hours a day.” *VFR
1547 Baha' ad-Din al-Amili (27 Feb 1547 in Baalbek, now in Lebanon - 30 Aug 1621 in Isfahan, Iran) was a Lebanese-born mathematician who wrote influential works on arithmetic, astronomy and grammar. Perhaps his most famous mathematical work was Quintessence of Calculation which was a treatise in ten sections, strongly influenced by The Key to Arithmetic (1427) by Jamshid al-Kashi. *SAU
Manuscript of The Summa of Arithmetics
1881 L(uitzen) E(gbertus) J(an) Brouwer (27 Feb 1881, 2 Dec 1966) was a Dutch mathematician who founded mathematical Intuitionism (a doctrine that views the nature of mathematics as mental constructions governed by self-evident laws). He founded modern topology by establishing, for example, the topological invariance of dimension and the fixpoint theorem. (Topology is the study of the most basic properties of geometric surfaces and configurations.) The Brouwer fixed point theorem is named in his honor. He proved the simplicial approximation theorem in the foundations of algebraic topology, which justifies the reduction to combinatorial terms, after sufficient subdivision of simplicial complexes, the treatment of general continuous mappings. *TIS He denies the law of the excluded middle. *VFR
1897 Bernard(-Ferdinand) Lyot (27 Feb 1897; 2 Apr 1952 at age 55) French astronomer who invented the coronagraph (1930), an instrument which allows the observation of the solar corona when the Sun is not in eclipse. Earlier, using his expertise in optics, Lyot made a very sensitive polariscope to study polarization of light reflected from planets. Observing from the Pic du Midi Observatory, he determined that the lunar surface behaves like volcanic dust, that Mars has sandstorms, and other results on the atmospheres of the other planets. Modifications to his polarimeter created the coronagraph, with which he photographed the Sun's corona and its analyzed its spectrum. He found new spectral lines in the corona, and he made (1939) the first motion pictures of solar prominences.*TIS
1910 Joseph Doob (27 Feb 1910 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA - 7 June 2004 in Clark-Lindsey Village, Urbana, Illinois, USA) American mathematician who worked in probability and measure theory. *SAU After writing a series of papers on the foundations of probability and stochastic processes including martingales, Markov processes, and stationary processes, Doob realized that there was a real need for a book showing what is known about the various types of stochastic processes. So he wrote his famous "Stochastic Processes" book. It was published in 1953 and soon became one of the most influential books in the development of modern probability theory. *Wik
1910 Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, (February 27, 1910 – December 21, 1990) an American aeronautical engineer, was born Feb. 27, 1910. Johnson came to head up the "Skunk Works" installation and design team at Lockheed, which was given great autonomy in designing cutting-edge aircraft. Johnson is given most of the credit for designing many of Lockheed's famous aircraft, including the SR-71 Blackbird, between 1937 and his retirement in 1975.
Fresh out of the University of Michigan in 1933, he was asked by Lockheed to do wind-tunnel tests on their new twin-engine Model 10 Electra, the first all-metal aircraft (second image). Johnson found the aircraft unstable and recommended that a double-tail be substituted. Surprisingly, Lockheed agreed, and Johnson’s career was off and running. In 1937, Amelia Earhart posed with Johnson and then took off in her twin-tailed Electra for her ill-fated flight around the world. The crash and disappearance of her plane is believed to be the result of fuel shortage and unrelated to the aircraft’s design.
Johnson's first real challenge came in 1937 when he was asked to design a fighter aircraft for the U.S. Army Air Corps, with the war impending. The first Lockheed P-38 Lightning rolled off the lines in 1939, with twin booms and twin stabilizers, the two engines on the booms and the crew and the guns in a separate nacelle between. With this unusual configuration, the P-38 proved adept as a fighter, a fighter bomber, and an aerial reconnaissance aircraft. Over 10,000 were built before the end of the War in 1945.
Another superlative aircraft that Johnson designed was the Lockheed P-104, soon relabeled the F-104 Starfighter. Introduced in 1958, it was intended to be more worthy rival for the Soviet MIG-15, and it was. The F-104, powered by a single turbojet engine, was highly maneuverable and capable of reaching extreme altitude and supersonic speeds. It is also a beautiful machine. Lockheed built more than 2500 of them for a dozen different air forces. Many are still flying.
The most famous aircraft that Johnson designed were the U-2 and the SR-71. The U-2 was designed for just one purpose - to cruise at 70,000 feet, where no aircraft has any business flying, and take pictures. To achieve this, many sacrifices were made, so that the aircraft was very difficult to fly, especially at lower altitudes, and safety margins were very slim. But it was a great spy plane, until Gary Powers and his U-2 were shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Lockheed continued producing U-2s until 1989, and they are still flying. Or so they tell me.
Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird is, in most expert's opinion, the finest design of Johnson's career, and perhaps of anyone’s career. Even it if didn't fly at all, it would be spectacular, because it looks like it is doing Mach 2 just sitting on the runway. The SR-71 was a reconnaissance aircraft, capable of flying at high altitude, but unlike the U-2, it was supersonic and maneuverable. You couldn’t shoot it down, even if you could find it on radar, because it could outrun anything you fired at it. To many aficionados, it is the Jaguar XK-E of aircraft – the most beautiful airplane ever built. Johnson must have had considerable chutzpah, for he decided to build the SR-71 out of titanium, a rare metal, of which Russia had almost all of the world’s supply. Somehow, he made that work. *Linda Hall Org
1942 Robert (Bob) Howard Grubbs (b. 27 February 1942 near Possum Trot, Kentucky, – December 19, 2021) ) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate. Grubbs's many awards have included: Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1974–76), Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1975–78), Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (1975), ACS Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry (2000), ACS Herman F. Mark Polymer Chemistry Award (2000), ACS Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods (2001), the Tolman Medal (2002), and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2005). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989 and a fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. Grubbs received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Richard R. Schrock and Yves Chauvin, for his work in the field of olefin metathesis. *Wik
1943 Steven Alan Orszag (February 27, 1943 – May 1, 2011) was an American mathematician. In 1962, at the age of 19, he graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. He did post graduate study at Cambridge University and in 1966 graduated with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. His thesis adviser was Martin David Kruskal. In 1967, Orszag was appointed as a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he collaborated with Carl M. Bender, and was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1984, he was appointed Forrest E Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University. In 1988, he accepted a position at Yale University and in 2000, he was named the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2011.
Orszag has won numerous awards including Sloan Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Fluid and Plasmadynamics Award, the Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society, and the Society of Engineering Science's G. I. Taylor Medal.
Orszag specialized in fluid dynamics, especially turbulence, computational physics and mathematics, electronic chip manufacturing, computer storage system design, and other topics in scientific computing. His work included the development of spectral methods, pseudo-spectral methods, direct numerical simulations, renormalization group methods for turbulence, and very-large-eddy simulations. He was the founder of and/or chief scientific adviser to a number of companies, including Flow Research, Ibrix (now part of HPQ), Vector Technologies, and Exa Corp.
With Carl M. Bender he wrote Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory, a standard text on mathematical methods for scientists. Orszag has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
At MIT he was a colleague of Carl M Bender and together they collaborated on a graduate level mathematics course for seven years. Bender said: [The course] was so popular that a lot of students from Harvard came to take it as well. A course that good really wasn't offered at Harvard.
1735 John Arbuthnot (baptized 29 Apr 1667, 27 Feb 1735 at age 67), fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. In 1710, his paper “An argument for divine providence taken form the constant regularity observ’s in the bith of both sexes” gave the first example of statistical inference. In his day he was famous for his political satires, from which we still know the character John Bull. *VFR
He inspired both Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels book III and Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus. He also translated Huygens' "De ratiociniis in ludo aleae " in 1692 and extended it by adding a few further games of chance. This was the first work on probability published in English.*SAU A nice blog about Arbuthnot and his work is at this post by *RMAT.
"It is impossible for a Die, with such determin'd force and direction, not to fall on such determin'd side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such determin'd side, and therefore I call it Chance, which is nothing but the want of art ... ."
1867 James Dunwoody Brownson DeBow (1820 – February 27, 1867) was an American publisher and statistician, best known for his influential magazine DeBow's Review, who also served as head of the U.S. Census from 1853-1857.*Wik
1906 Samuel Pierpont Langley, (22 Aug 1834; 27 Feb 1906)American astronomer, physicist, and aeronautics pioneer who built the first heavier-than-air flying machine to achieve sustained flight. He launched his Aerodrome No.5 on 6 May 1896 using a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River, near Quantico, Virginia. He also researched the relationship of solar phenomena to meteorology. *TIS
1915 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
1975 Hyman Levy (28 Feb 1889 in Edinburgh, Scotland - 27 Feb 1975 in Wimbledon, London, England )graduated from Edinburgh and went on to study in Göttingen. He was forced to leave Germany on the outbreak of World War II and returned to work at Oxford and at the National Physical Laboratory. He held various posts in Imperial College London, finishing as Head of the Mathematics department. His main work was in the numerical solution of differential equations. he published Numerical Studies in Differential Equations (1934), Elements of the Theory of Probability (1936), and Finite Difference Equations (1958). However, Levy was more than a mathematician. He was a philosopher of science and also a political activist. *SAU
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
