I recently came across a note that the Peter Mark Roget whose name is associated so closely with the thesaurus was a scientific type. More particularly, in 1815 he invented the log-log scale (the logarithm of the logarithm of the number on the C and D scales... ) on the slide rule which facilitated finding powers and roots of numbers.
I looked into his history and found that his education was in medicine and his work on the thesaurus was part of a lifelong coping mechanism to fight depression. Roget described his thesaurus in the foreword to the first edition in 1852:
"It is now nearly fifty years since I first projected a system of verbal classification similar to that on which the present work is founded. Conceiving that such a compilation might help to supply my own deficiencies, I had, in the year 1805, completed a classed catalogue of words on a small scale, but on the same principle, and nearly in the same form, as the Thesaurus now published."
But before he actually got around to publishing his great book, he not only invented the slide rule scale, but following the death of Sir John Herschel, Roget was secretary of the Royal Society from 1827 to 1848. He also made observations in sight and persistence of vision that influenced the development of movies.
On 9 December 1824, Roget presented a paper entitled Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures. ... While Roget's explanation of the illusion was probably wrong, his consideration of the illusion of motion was an important point in the history of film, and probably influenced the development of the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistiscope and the Zoetrope.
Amazon offers a paperback (20 pages) book from Roget's paper.
Roget also was involved in the creation of University of London and the precursor to the Royal Medical Society. A busy Guy...
William Ensign Lincoln invented the definitive zoetrope in 1865 when he was about 18 years old and a sophomore at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Lincoln's patented version had the viewing slits on a level above the pictures, which allowed the use of easily replaceable strips of images. It also had an illustrated paper disc on the base, which was not always exploited on the commercially produced versions. On advice of a local bookstore owner, Lincoln sent a model to color lithographers and board game manufacturers Milton Bradley and Co.
The name zoetrope was composed from the Greek root words ζωή zoe, "life" and τρόπος tropos, "turning" as a translation of "wheel of life". The term was coined by inventor William E. LincolnW.E. Lincoln's U.S. Patent No. 64,117 of April 23, 1867
While I was searching this out, I came across the fact that the invention of the Ln scale (for finding e^x) was by an 11th grade high school student. From a post by Robert Adams:
The Ln scale was invented by a high school student, Stephen B. Cohen, in 1958. The originalintent was to allow the user to select an exponent (in the range 0 to 2.3) on the Ln scale and read e^x on the C (or D) scale and e^(-x) on the CI (or DI) scale. Pickett and Eckel were given exclusiverights to the scale in the early sixties. Later, Stephen Cohen created a set of "marks" on the Lnscale to extend the range beyond the 2.3 limit, but Pickett never incorporated these marks on anyof their slide rules.
And just one more footnote, I always found it a little quirky that the log scale on the slide rule was linear.
After I wrote this, several readers commented about people you might not know were science/math folks. Steven Colyer offered three offhand :
Art Garfunkel studied Mathematics at Columbia University.
Mick Jagger went to The London School of Economics.
August Ferdinand Möbius of Möbius strip fame was primarily an Astronomer.
I added that actress Teri Hatcher (Lois Lane, Desperate housewives...) studied math and engineering at De Anza College. Not an unlikely choice since her mother was a computer programmer at Lockhead-Martin and her dad was a nuclear physicist.
Steve reminded me that Winnie on "Wonder Years" long ago, Danica McKellar, studied math at UCLA and later wrote several books, including "Math Doesn't Suck" to motivate young women towards math science studies.
And in more modern time several writers on The Simpsons, and Mayim Bialik on The Big Bang Theory have impressive Sci/math credentials.
Surprise me with your list of strange connections.
Newton is, of course, the greatest of all Cambridge professors; he also happens to be the greatest disaster that ever befell not merely Cambridge mathematics in particular, but British mathematical science as a whole. ~Leonard Roth (This quote probably needs a brief explanation for young readers. The conflict between Newton and Leibniz over the discovery of Calculus isolated England from the more rapidly developing function notations used in Europe. It would not be until the mid 19th century that young British Intellectuals would press to adopt the continental ideas.)
The 332nd day of the year; 332 is the number of ways to partition 47 into non-zero triangular numbers. (36 + 10 + 1 would be one such way)
The sum of the first 332 primes is a prime.
As numbers get larger and larger, it would seem that there would be fewer and fewer primes in each century of them, such as from 100 to 199. But there seem to be a large number of centuries with only six primes. There are only five year days such that between 100*n and 100*n+99 there are exactly six primes. 332 is one of them. (there are exactly six primes between 33200 and 33299)
EVENTS
In 2348 BC, a supposed comet under divine guidance passed near Earth, causing the Great Flood, in the opinion of Anglican priest and mathematician, William Whiston. In his time, the water composition of comets was known. He said the forty days of rain resulted from the Earth's travel through the comet's tail. The body's gravity stretched and cracked the earth's brittle crust, and waters arose from the "fountains of the great deep." He explained this in his popular treatise New Theory of the Earth (1696), describing the Book of Genesis in terms of physics based on the Principia written by his mentor, Isaac Newton. Whiston succeeded Newton and became the third Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University (May 1702)*TIS
Whiston was expelled from his chair on 30 October 1710; at the appeal of the heads of colleges. Whiston was removed from his position at Cambridge, and denied membership in the Royal Society for his “heretical” views. He took the “wrong” side in the battle between Arianism and the Trinitarian view, but his brilliance still made the public attend to his proclamations. (V Fred Rickey put it this way, "it is not acceptable to be a unitarian at the College of the Whole and Undivided Trinity".) When he predicted the end of the world by a collision with a comet in October 16th of 1736 the Archbishop of Canterbury had to issue a denial to calm the panic.
1659 The first person to draw a map of Mars that displayed terrain features was the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. On November 28, 1659 he made an illustration of Mars that showed the distinct dark region now known as Syrtis Major Planum, and possibly one of the polar ice caps. The Italian Jesuit Daniello Bartoli had reported observing two dark patches on Mars in 1651.
Later drawings of Mars By Huygens * @HoooAW
1660 After attending a lecture by Christopher Wren, a group gathered to discuss the founding of “a college for the promoting of physico-mathematical experimental learning.” The result was to become the Royal Society of London. *VFR The Society subsequently petitioned King Charles II to recognise it and to make a royal grant of incorporation. The Royal Charter, which was passed by the Great Seal on 15 Jul 1662, created the Royal Society of London.*TIS Memorandum November 28 1660: "These persons following according to the usual custom of most of them, met together at Gresham College to hear Mr Wren's lecture, viz. The Lord Brouncker, Mr Boyle, Mr Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paule Neile, Dr Wilkins, Dr Goddard, Dr Petty, Mr Ball, Mr Rooke, Mr Wren, Mr Hill. And after the lecture was ended they did according to the usual manner, withdraw for mutual converse."
1679 Newton writes the Royal Society to suggest that if falling objects were studied, they would find a consistent deviation east due to the rotation of the earth.*VFR (Hook will later experiment and observe motion both to the west and the south. (see 6 Jan, 1680)) 1772 At the Board meeting of 28 November 1772 Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal, presented the other astronomer's suggestions 'for improving (Tobias) Mayer's (Lunar) Tables by lessening the Errors in the method of calculation which he had perfected under the encouragement of the Board ; and at the same time reported that he has reduced the Errors of those Tables to about one half'. Maskelyne is often viewed as an opponent of computing longitude by clock, but as early as 1765 he was quoted as saying, "the calculations would be always somewhat conciser in the method by the watch than in that by the Moon" *Board of Longitude project, Royal Museums Greenwich
1889 The Gilbert Club was officially formed on 28 November 1889. Advertised by a specially printed circular sent to select scientists, engineers, and other enthusiasts, the proposed association was also mentioned in the Times and in the leading British and American scientific weeklies, Nature and Science. By the time of the inaugural meeting, eighty-seven members had already signed up, many of whom were gathered in the chambers of the Society of Arts that afternoon to hear Silvanus Phillips Thompson describe the eminence and importance of William Gilbert of Colchester (1544-1603), the doctor whose early experimental investigations "constituted the absolute starting-point of the science of electricity." The Gilbert Club counted among its first members numerous Fellows of the Royal Society and other prominent scientists in all fields, including Lord Rayleigh, John Tyndall, John Lubbock, Oliver Lodge, and the Presidents of the Physical Society and the Royal College of Surgeons. Leading these luminaries at the inaugural meeting was the most famous living British physicist and current President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin). *Canadian Journal of History, 2003
William Gilbert M.D. demonstrating his experiments before Queen Elizabeth I (painting by A. Auckland Hunt)
*Wik
1895 The day (I suspect) that the term "Octonions" was introduced into mathematical vocabulary. On this day a paper from Alex McAuley of the Univ of Tasmania was read to the Royal Society of London by Rev N. M. Ferrers with the title Octonions. The first sentence says, "Octonions is a name adapted for various reasons in place of Clifford's Bi-quaternions." Hamilton had already used the latter term in an altogether different sense. *Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Volume 59 1936 This is the earliest exact date I can find where L. R. Ford presented information about his ideas on Ford Circles. He presented his idea at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Lawrence Kansas. (If someone knows dates of presentations at Rice, Univ of Texas, etc I would love to have those dates and any information on which parts were presented). *Am Mathematical Monthly, 1938.
In 1967, the first pulsating radio source (pulsar) was detected by an alert graduate student, Jocelyn Bell (see 15 July, 1943), then working under the direction of Prof. A. Hewish at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, Cambridge, England. They were using a special radio telescope, a large array of 2,048 aerials covering an area of 4.4 acres. The discovery of these fascinating objects opened new horizons in studies as diverse as quantum-degenerate fluids, relativistic gravity and interstellar magnetic fields. Under extraordinary physical conditions, radiation is generated and appears pulsed with a clock-like precision synchronously with the pulsar rotational period. These periods range from 1.57 milliseconds to 5.1 sec. *TIS
Jocelyn Bell, June 1967
2023 For the first time ever, a commercial plane flew across the Atlantic Ocean without using fossil fuels.
Virgin Atlantic said the test flight Tuesday from London to New York was powered only by sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, a broad category of jet fuel that creates fewer carbon emissions than standard kerosene blends. The fuel on this flight was made from waste fats and plant sugars and emits 70% less carbon than petroleum-based jet fuel, according to a press release. It landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday afternoon.
BIRTHS
1700 Nathaniel Bliss (28 Nov 1700; 2 Sep 1764) Britain's fourth Astronomer Royal, though only for the two years before his death. In 1736, Bliss became rector of St Ebbe's Oxford, and in 1742, he followed Halley as Savilian Professor of Geometry. Bliss occasionally assisted James Bradley, third A.R. In 1761, he made observations of the transit of Venus when Bradley was unable to do so due to poor health. Bliss succeeded Bradley in 1762. On 1 Apr 1764 Bliss published his observations of the annular eclipse visible from Greenwich. Besides his Observatory work, Bliss also worked for and with the Earl of Macclesfield, on astronomical problems. This work included making meridian observations of a comet approaching the Sun around 1744 at Shirburn Castle and at Greenwich.*TIS
1772 Luke Howard, FRS (28 November 1772 – 21 March 1864) was a British manufacturing chemist and an amateur meteorologist with broad interests in science. His lasting contribution to science is a nomenclature system for clouds, which he proposed in an 1802 presentation to the Askesian Society. He has been called "the father of meteorology" because of his comprehensive recordings of weather in the London area from 1801 to 1841 and his writings, which transformed the science of meteorology. *Wik
A depiction of a cumulostratus cloud, included in Howard's 'On the modification of clouds'
*Wik
1898 John Wishart FRSE (28 November 1898 – 14 July 1956) was a Scottish mathematician and agricultural statistician. He worked successively at University College London with Karl Pearson, at Rothamsted Experimental Station with Ronald Fisher, and then as a reader in statistics in the University of Cambridge where he became the first Director of the Statistical Laboratory in 1953. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1931, and edited Biometrika from 1937. The Wishart distribution is named after him. Wishart died at age 57 in a bathing accident in Acapulco while representing the Food and Agriculture Organization on a mission to set up a research centre.*Wik
In statistics, the Wishart distribution is a generalization to multiple dimensions of the gamma distribution.
1905 Albert William Tucker (28 November 1905 – 25 January 1995) was a Canadian-born American mathematician who made important contributions in topology, game theory, and non-linear programming.In the 1960s, he was heavily involved in mathematics education, as chair of the AP Calculus committee for the College Board (1960–1963), through work with the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) of the MAA (he was president of the MAA in 1961–1962), and through many NSF summer workshops for high school and college teachers. In the early 1980s, Tucker recruited Princeton history professor Charles Gillispie to help him set up an oral history project to preserve stories about the Princeton mathematical community in the 1930s. With funding from the Sloan Foundation, this project later expanded its scope. Among those who shared their memories of such figures as Einstein, von Neumann, and Gödel were computer pioneer Herman Goldstine and Nobel laureates John Bardeen and Eugene Wigner. Albert Tucker noticed the leadership ability and talent of a young mathematics graduate student named John G. Kemeny, whose hiring Tucker suggested to Dartmouth College. Following Tucker's advice, Dartmouth recruited Kemeny, who became Chair of the Mathematics Department and later College President. Years later, Darthmouth College recognized Albert Tucker with an honorary degree. Tucker died in Highstown, N.J. in 1995 at age 89. *Wik
1950 Russell Alan Hulse (28 Nov 1950, )American physicist who in 1993 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with his former teacher, the astrophysicist Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., for their joint discovery of the first binary pulsar (1974). This is an astronomical system of two celestial bodies so close they are separated by only several times the distance between the moon and the earth. Their findings, first reported in 1978, constitute the first indirect proof of the existence of the gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. *TIS
DEATHS
1821 Samuel Vince (6 April 1749; Fressingfield – 28 November, 1821; Ramsgate) was an English clergyman, mathematician and astronomer at the University of Cambridge. The son of a plasterer, Vince was admitted as a sizar to Caius College, Cambridge in 1771. In 1775 he was Senior Wrangler, and Winner of the Smith Prize at Cambridge. Migrating to Sidney Sussex College in 1777, he gained his M.A. in 1778 and was ordained a clergyman in 1779. He was awarded the Copley Medal in 1780 and was Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge from 1796 until his death. As a mathematician, Vince wrote on many aspects of his expertise, including logarithms and imaginary numbers. His Observations on the Theory of the Motion and Resistance of Fluids and Experiments upon the Resistance of Bodies Moving in Fluids had later importance to aviation history. He was also author of the influential A Complete System of Astronomy (3 vols. 1797-1808). Vince also published the pamphlet The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, In Answer to Mr. Hume's Objections; In Two Discourses Preached Before the University of Cambridge by the Rev. S. Vince. In this work, Vince made an apology of the Christian religion and, like Charles Babbage, sought to present rational arguments in favor of the belief in miracles, against David Hume's criticism. *Wik
1872 Mary Somerville, a Scottish mathematician and science writer, died Nov. 28, 1872, at the venerable age of 91. Somerville was one of the most highly praised female scientific writers of the 19th century. Between 1798 and 1825, the French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace published his Traité de mécanique céleste, a comprehensive 5-volume updating of Isaac Newton's celestial physics. Somerville read and digested the entire work, and in 1831, she published Mechanism of the Heavens, a rather free translation of Laplace's work and considerably easier to understand than the original. Laplace said to her, before he died in 1827, that there had been only three women who understood his work: Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, and a Mary Grieg whom he had never met. Little did Laplace know that Mary Somerville had been Mary Grieg before her first husband died, so she actually occupied 2/3 of Laplace's list.
In 1834, Somerville published the first of a number of popular scientific books, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Interestingly, the philosopher William Whewell wrote a review of On the Connexion of the Sciences in 1834, and in the review he coined the word "scientist" as an appropriate name for a person who dabbles in experimental natural philosophy. *Linda Hall Org
In 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
When John Stuart Mill organized a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he made sure that the first signature on the petition would be Somerville's. *Wik
1914 Johann Wilhelm Hittorf (27 Mar 1824, 28 Nov 1914) German physicist who was a pioneer in electrochemical research. His early investigations were on the allotropes (different physical forms) of phosphorus and selenium. He was the first to compute the electricity- carrying capacity of charged atoms and molecules (ions), an important factor in understanding electrochemical reactions. He investigated the migration of ions during electrolysis (1853-59), developed expressions for and measured transport numbers. In 1869, he published his laws governing the migration of ions. For his studies of electrical phenomena in rarefied gases, the Hittorf tube has been named for him. Hittorf determined a number of properties of cathode rays, including (before Crookes) the deflection of the rays by a magnet. *TIS
1943 Eduard Helly (1 June 1884 in Vienna, Austria - 28 Nov 1943 in Chicago, Illinois, USA) Helly worked on functional analysis and proved the Hahn-Banach theorem in 1912 fifteen years before Hahn published essentially the same proof and 20 years before Banach gave his new setting. *SAU
Helly worked as a tutor, Gymnasium teacher, and textbook editor until World War I, when he enlisted in the Austrian army. He was shot in 1915, and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Russians. In one prison camp in Berezovka, Siberia, he organized a mathematical seminar in which Tibor Radó, then an engineer, began his interest in pure mathematics.
In the same 1912 paper in which he introduced Helly's selection theorem concerning the convergence of sequences of functions, Helly published a proof of a special case of the Hahn–Banach theorem, 15 years before Hans Hahn and Stefan Banach discovered it independently.
1952 Fritz Carlson (23 July 1888 in Vimmerby, Sweden - 28 Nov 1952 in Stockholm, Sweden) His main work focused on the theory of analytic functions. Some of his most well-known contributions are a theorem connected to the Phragmén-Lindelöf principle, a theorem about the zeros of the V-function and several theorems about power series with integer coefficients. Such names as Carlson inequality, Carlson - Levin constants, Carlson theorem in complex analysis, Pólya - Carlson theorem on rational functions and Carlson theorem on Dirichlet series are well-known in mathematics. *SAU
1954 Enrico Fermi (29 Sep 1901, 28 Nov 1954) Italian-born American physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1938 as one of the chief architects of the nuclear age. He was the last of the double-threat physicists: a genius at creating both esoteric theories and elegant experiments. In 1933, he developed the theory of beta decay, postulating that the newly-discovered neutron decaying to a proton emits an electron and a particle he called a neutrino. Developing theory to explain this decay later resulted in finding the weak interaction force. He developed the mathematical statistics required to clarify a large class of subatomic phenomena, discovered neutron-induced radioactivity, and directed the first controlled chain reaction involving nuclear fission. *TIS Emilio Segre tells this story in his biography of Fermi: "Fermi told me that one of his great intellectual efforts was his attempt to understand - at the age of ten- what was meant by the statement that the equation x2 + y2 = z2 represents a circle. Someone must have stated the fact to him, but he had to discover the meaning by himself." Fermi, while working in Los Alamos once calculated very high odds that the Earth should have been visited by aliens repeatedly over history. He sometimes would call out, "Where are they?" Once, it was said, Fermi uttered his famous question in the presence of Lio Szilard, who responded, "They are among us, but they call themselves Hungarians." *P Ballew "Where are They?".... We are here!
Enrico Fermi between Franco Rasetti (left) and Emilio Segrè in academic dress
*Wik
1954 Herbert Bright, developer of one of the first FORTRAN user programs (and consequently, the first error message), dies at 67. Bright had been a promoter of security through data encryption, as well as a research engineer at AT&T Laboratories. He also held various executive offices in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).*CHM
1968 Jean Frédéric Auguste Delsarte (October 19, 1903, Fourmies – November 28, 1968, Nancy) was a French mathematician known for his work in mathematical analysis, in particular, for introducing mean-periodic functions and generalized shift operators. He was one of the founders of the Bourbaki group.*Wik 1968 Leonard Roth (29 August 1904 Edmonton, London, England – 28 November 1968 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was a mathematician working in the Italian school of algebraic geometry. He introduced an example of a unirational variety that was not rational (though his proof that it was not rational was incomplete).*Wik 1969 Elbert Frank Cox (December 5, 1895–November 28, 1969) was an American mathematician who became the first black person in the world to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics(Cornell Univ., 1925). He spent most of his life as a professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was known as an excellent teacher. During his life, he overcame various difficulties which arose because of his race. In his honor, the National Association of Mathematicians established the Cox-Talbot Address, which is annually delivered at the NAM's national meetings. The Elbert F. Cox Scholarship Fund, which is used to help black students pursue studies, is named in his honor as well.
Cox studied at Indiana University Bloomington. Besides mathematics, Cox also took courses in German, English, Latin, history, hygiene, chemistry, education, philosophy and physics. There were three other Black students in his class. He received his bachelor's degree in 1917, at a time when the transcript of every Black student had the word "Colored" printed across it. He received A's on all his exams while at Indiana
*Wik
2004 Anna Adelaide Stafford Henriques (August 20, 1905 – November 28, 2004) was an American mathematician known for her pioneering role as a female researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Anna was born on August 20, 1905, in Chicago, the first of five children in her family. Her father was a factory manager, and both her parents were children of immigrants. The family moved from Chicago to Wisconsin and Minnesota; her parents died in 1919 and the children moved again to a relative's home in Missouri.
Stafford graduated from high school in 1922 and, with a scholarship from the American Association of University Women, did her undergraduate studies at the Western College for Women, graduating in 1926 with a double major in Greek and mathematics and a minor in French. She became a school mathematics and science teacher in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, while attending summer classes at the University of Chicago.
Stafford completed a master's degree at Chicago in 1931, with a thesis on An Application of the Dihedral Group. She became interested in topology after seeing a talk by Raymond Louis Wilder, and became a student of Mayme Logsdon at Chicago, completing her doctorate in 1933 with a dissertation on Knotted Varieties.
In preparation for her postdoctoral studies, Stafford had applied to Princeton University to work with James Waddell Alexander II and Oswald Veblen, but was rejected because she was female. She then wrote directly to Veblen, who had been newly appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study (also in Princeton, New Jersey, but separate from the university), and after talking to him when he visited Chicago, she was accepted there.
Stafford became one of two women, with Mabel Schmeiser, in the first group of postdoctoral researchers to visit the Institute. She worked at the Institute from 1933 to 1935, and in order to support herself she also held a teaching position at a school in Princeton. She worked mornings at the school, freeing her afternoons to attend seminars at the Institute.
After her time at the Institute, Stafford decided to aim for a career teaching mathematics rather than one as a researcher. She became an instructor at the University of Nebraska, and then in 1937 moved to the University of Utah. At Utah, her students included Tom M. Apostol, who remembered her as his "best mathematics teacher". She also served there as president of the Utah branch of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
In 1942, in Salt Lake City, she married (as his second wife) Douglas Emmanuel Henriques, an administrative judge. Although Stafford and her husband had no children together, they raised Henriques' teenage son and fostered two Navajo girls.
In 1956, a change of position for Stafford's husband caused their family to move to New Mexico. She gave up what was then an associate professorship in Utah and became a lecturer at St. Michael's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and soon after also at the University of New Mexico. She became a full professor at St. Michael's in 1962, and gave up her second position at the University of New Mexico. She eventually became department chair at St. Michael's (later the Santa Fe University of Art and Design), and retired as chair emeritus in 1971.
Stafford and her husband lived in their retirement in Falls Church, Virginia. Her husband died in 1987, and she died on November 28, 2004, in Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia.
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
Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected. ~ Edward Griffith Begle
The 331st day of the year;
31, 331, 3331, 33331 are all prime. What percentage of the numbers 33....331 are prime? Is there a pattern? A nice symmetric pic from Jim Wilder@wilderlab:
331 is also the sum of five consecutive primes. It is both a centered Pentagonal number and a centered Hexagonal number.
EVENTS
1689, Edmond Halley proposed the 21 year-old Joseph Raphson as a member of the Royal Society. He was elected three days later.
Raphson's most notable work is Analysis Aequationum Universalis, which was published in 1690. It contains a method, now known as the Newton–Raphson method, for approximating the roots of an equation. Isaac Newton had developed a very similar formula in his Method of Fluxions, written in 1671, but this work would not be published until 1736, nearly 50 years after Raphson's Analysis. However, Raphson's version of the method is simpler than Newton's, and is therefore generally considered superior. For this reason, it is Raphson's version of the method, rather than Newton's, that is to be found in textbooks today.*Wik
In numerical analysis, Newton's method, also known as the Newton–Raphson method, named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a root-finding algorithm which produces successively better approximations to the roots (or zeroes) of a real-valued function. The most basic version starts with a real-valued function f, its derivative f′, and an initial guess x0 for a root of f. If f satisfies certain assumptions and the initial guess is close, then...
is a better approximation.
727 Isaac Greenwood began his “private” lectures as Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard. These lectures were given to selected students and required parental permission, probably to insure payment of the attendance fee of forty shillings. [I. B. Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science, p. 35]. *VFR
During his tenure, he wrote anonymously the first natively-published American book on mathematics – the Greenwood Book, published in 1729. This book made the first published statement of the short scale value for billion in the United States, which eventually became the value used in most English-speaking countries. (See Smith's book on this here.)
During his tenure at Harvard, he published Arithmetick Vulgar and Decimal (1729), the first arithmetic book written and published in the English colonies in what is now the Eastern United States, often called Colonial America. Although the book appeared anonymously, its origins are definitely attributed to Greenwood.
*MAA
1783 John Michell made the first proposal of what would come to be called black holes, which he called "dark stars" in a paper read on this day in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. During the chaotic wars over President Banks in January of 1784, the only papers interrupting the partisan bickering was the continuation of the reading of Mitchell's paper. *Wik , *Cavendish by Christa Jungnickel, Russell McCormmac
Michell devised a torsion balance for measuring the mass of the Earth, but died before he could use it. His instrument passed into the hands of his lifelong friend Henry Cavendish, who first performed in 1798 the experiment now known as the Cavendish Experiment. Placing two 1-kg lead balls at the ends of a six-foot rod, he suspended the rod horizontally by a fibre attached to its centre. Then he placed a massive lead ball beside each of the small ones, causing a gravitational attraction that led the rod to turn clockwise. By measuring the rod's movement, Cavendish was able to calculate the force exerted by each of the large balls on the 1-kg balls. From these calculations, he was able to provide an accurate estimate of the gravitational constant and of the mass and average density of the Earth. Cavendish gave Michell full credit for his accomplishment. *Wik
In 1826, John Walker (1781-1859), an English pharmacist from Stockton-on-Tees, invented the first practical, strike-anywhere, friction match, but refused to patent his creation. He used three-inch splints of wood, tipped with potassium chlorate, antimony sulphide, and gum arabic. The match head was ignited by drawing it through a fold of fine glasspaper. By 1829, similar matches called "Lucifers" were sold throughout London. Their difference was added sulphur to aid combustion, and white phosphorus. Matchmaking workers quickly developed a bone disease called "phossy jaw" from the phosphorus. Phosphorus sesquisulphide replaced the deadly white phosphorus in the strike-anywhere match during the early twentieth century.*TIS
A tin "Congreves" matchbox (1827)
1839 "On November 27, 1839, five men held a meeting in the rooms of the American Education Society at No. 15 Cornhill in Boston, Massachusetts, to organize a statistical society. Its purpose, as stated in the society's first constitution, was to "collect, preserve, and diffuse statistical information in the different departments of human knowledge." Originally called the American Statistical Society, the organization's name was changed to the American Statistical Association (ASA) at its first annual meeting, held in Boston on February 5, 1840. " *Robert L. Mason, ASA: The First 160 Years The five men were "William Cogswell, teacher, fund-raiser for the ministry, and genealogist; Richard Fletcher, lawyer and U.S. Congressman; John Dix Fisher, physician and pioneer in medical reform; Oliver Peabody, lawyer, clergyman, poet, and editor; and Lemuel Shattuck, statistician, genealogist, publisher, and author of perhaps the most significant single document in the history of public health to that date. " *ASA
His Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts in 1850 has been described as a prophetic document in its anticipation of public health developments. Lemuel Shattuck is remembered at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine where his name appears on the school's frieze. The names of 23 pioneers of public health and tropical medicine were chosen to be honored when the School was built in 1929.
Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston is named after him. (Not bad for a guy you never heard of, eh!)
Lemuel Shattuck's name as it appears on the Frieze of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
1875 Johns Hopkins University offered J. J. Sylvester 5000 dollars a year plus moving expenses to assume the mathematics professorship. He set three conditions under which he would accept: The sum be paid in gold, the university provide a residence, and that he be allowed to appropriate student fees. Only the first was acceptable to the university, but Sylvester agreed when the offer was increased to 6000 in gold. Shortly after arriving he founded the American Journal of Mathematics. In 1883 he left to become Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford. *VFR
In 1895, Alfred Nobel had his will drawn up in Paris, then deposited in a bank in Stockholm. In it, he provided for most of his fortune to be put in trust to establish the Nobel Prizes. As the inventor of new, more powerful explosives used in the weapons of war, he left a legacy to reward those persons who provided benefits to mankind. Prizes were to be established in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, literature and a prize for peace. He died a year later, 10 Dec 1896, of a cerebral hemorrhage at his villa in San Remo, Italy, leaving this surprise at the opening of his will. *TIS
1966 The APL language was introduced by Kenneth Iverson. APL was unique in that its primitives are denoted by symbols, not words. These symbols were originally devised as a mathematical notation to describe algorithms. Two of these swept into common math notation to replace the Gauss symbol [n] for the greatest integer function. The Floor function, \(\lfloor{n}\rfloor\) , and the ceiling function, \( \lceil{n}\rceil\). And as a comment on another blog shared. "⌈e⌉ = ⌊π⌋."
1979 The New York Times in an article entitled “Soviet mathematician is obscure no more,” reported on Leonid Khachiyan, the 27-year-old discoverer of a polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming. *Mathematics Magazine 53 (1980), p 119.
He was most famous for his ellipsoid algorithm (1979) for linear programming,[ which was the first such algorithm known to have a polynomial running time. Even though this algorithm was shown to be impractical, it has inspired other randomized algorithms for convex programming and is considered a significant theoretical breakthrough.
1984 Binion’s Horseshoe Casino announced that a Texan, known only as “Tom,” lost 1 million dollars on a single roll of the dice and “acted like it was nothing.” He won 770,000 on a single roll in 1980 and 538,000 earlier this year, so he is still ahead. Is this a good way to gamble? [AP Press Release] *VFR 1995 Microsoft Corp. shipped its Internet Explorer 2.0, starting a browser war with the popular Netscape Navigator. Netscape Communications Corp. had had a virtual monopoly on World Wide Web browsers since the infancy of the web. The Netscape Navigator and Communicator browsers serve as a format for viewing and creating World Wide Web pages, as well as participating in newsgroups and sending e-mail. Microsoft promotes its Internet Explorer with specific mention of its privacy and encryption.*CHM
In 2001, sodium was detected in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet by the Hubble Space Telescope. The planetary atmosphere of HD 209458b was the first outside our solar system to be measured. The planet, informally known as Osiris, was the first transiting planet discovered (5 Nov 1999). It orbits the sun-like star designated HD 209458. Later measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (2003-4), found an enormous ellipsoidal envelope of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen around the planet with a temperature that reaches 10,000°C, resulting in a significant "tail" of atoms moving at speeds greater than the escape velocity.*TIS
Found on the Hubble Site"How could life thrive on a gassy planet that is 20 times closer to its parent star than the Earth is to the Sun?"
What in the heck could "20 times closer" even mean? "Twice as short? Three times colder?
2023A filament erupted from the sun on Nov. 27, 2023, and left a “canyon of fire” visible in the bottom right of this view. A long filament of roiling plasma arcing over the sun's surface snapped this week, leaving behind a scalding scar that has been dubbed a “canyon of fire.” SciAm Today in Science
*SciAm
BIRTHS
1701 Birthdate of the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius(27 November 1701 – 25 April 1744). (forgive me, I love etymology,[The name Celsius is a latinization of the estate's name (Latin celsus 'mound')]) In 1742 he popularized a thermometer with a 100-degree scale. As fixed points he chose the freezing and boiling points of water, calling them 100 and 0 respectively. In 1747 the present system with the scale reversed was introduced. Around 1800 people started calling this the Celsius Thermometer. *VFR Celsius was born in Uppsala where he succeeded his father as professor of astronomy in 1730. It was there also that he built Sweden's first observatory in 1741. He and his assistant Olof Hiortner discovered that aurora borealis influence compass needles.*TIS
The observatory of Anders Celsius, from a contemporary engraving
1848 Henry Augustus Rowland (27 Nov 1848; 16 Apr 1901)American physicist who invented the concave diffraction grating, which replaced prisms and plane gratings in many applications, and revolutionized spectrum analysis--the resolution of a beam of light into components that differ in wavelength. His first major research was an investigation of the magnetic permeability of iron, steel and nickel, work which won the praise of Maxwell. Another experiment was the first to conclusively demonstrate that the motion of charged bodies produced magnetic effects. In the late 1870s, he established an authoritative figure for the absolute value of the ohm, and redetermined the mechanical equivalent of heat in the early 1880s, demonstrating that the specific heat of water varied with temperature. *TIS
1849 Sir Horace Lamb (27 Nov 1849; 4 Dec 1934) English mathematician who contributed to the field of mathematical physics. Topics he worked on include wave propagation, electrical induction, earthquakes, and the theory of tides. He wrote important papers on the oscillations of a viscous spheroid, the vibrations of elastic spheres, waves in elastic solids, electric waves and the absorption of light. In a famous paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society he showed how Rayleigh's results on the vibrations of thin plates fitted with the general equations of the theory. Another paper reported on his study of the propagation of waves on the surface of an elastic solid where he tried to understand the way that earthquake tremors are transmitted around the surface of the Earth. *TIS
1867 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
1871 Giovanni Giorgi (27 Nov 1871; 19 Aug 1950) Italian physicist who proposed a widely used system for the definition of electrical, magnetic, and mechanical units of measurement. He developed the Giorgi International System of Measurement (also known as the mksa system) in 1901. Originally, he suggested that the basic units of scientific measurement be the metre, kilogram, second, and joule. With the the ampere replacing the joule as a basic unit, this system was subsequently endorsed by the General Conference of Weights and Measures (1960). Giorgi also worked in hydroelectric power, electricity distribution networks, and urban trolley systems.*TIS
1914 Edward Griffith Begle (27 Nov 1914; 2 Mar 1978) American mathematician, a topologist, who led development of "new math." When the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite (1957), beating the U.S. into space, the effectiveness of science and mathematics education in American schools came under scrutiny. Begle's idea was to replace the traditional focus on mathematics as memorization and algorithmic computation. Instead, he designed a program to emphasize the fundamental importance of understanding the principles of mathematics. He directed (1958-72) the School Mathematics Study Group, funded by the National Science Foundation. SMSG produced teaching materials for all grade levels with this approach. Ultimately, initiating evolved.)lasting reform through teachers was unsuccessful.*TIS
(A good guy with the best of intentions, but his vision was not what evolved)
1923 J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. (27 Nov 1923, ) African-American physicist, mathematician, and engineer (chemical/nuclear). He entered the University of Chicago at age 13, and by age 19, in 1942, he became the seventh African American to obtain a Ph.D. in Mathematics. His career achievement has been to develop radiation shielding against gamma radiation, emitted during electron decay of the Sun and other nuclear sources. He developed mathematical models to calculate the amount of gamma radiation absorbed by a given material. This technique of calculating radiative absorption is widely used among researcher in space and nuclear science projects. His was also a joint owner of a company which designed and developed nuclear reactors for electrical power generation.*TIS
Sketch of Wilkins from a U.S. Department of Energy biography
DEATHS
1680 Athanasius Kircher (2 May 1601, 27 Nov 1680) German Jesuit priest and scholar, sometimes called the last Renaissance man. Kircher's prodigious research activity spanned a variety of disciplines including geography, astronomy, physics, mathematics, language, medicine, and music. He made an early, though unsuccessful attempt to decipher hieroglyphics of the Coptic language. During the pursuit of experimental knowledge, he once had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius to observe its features soon after an eruption. He made one of the first natural history collections. Kircher studied animal luminescence, writing two chapters of his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae to bioluminescence, and debunked the idea that that an extract made from fireflies could be used to light houses. *TIS
1754 Abraham de Moivre,(26 May 1667 in Vitry-le-François , Champagne , France — 27 November 1754 in London, England) the mathematics tutor, succumbed at the age of 87, to lethargy. He was sleeping twenty hours a day, and it became a joke that he slept a quarter of an hour more every day and would die when he slept the whole day through. *VFR French mathematician who was a pioneer in the development of analytic trigonometry and in the theory of probability. He published The Doctrine of Chance in 1718. The definition of statistical independence appears in this book together with many problems with dice and other games. He also investigated mortality statistics and the foundation of the theory of annuities. He died in poverty, and correctly predicted the day of his own death. (more myth than fact, but in his weakened state he was sleeping most of his days away at the end.) He found that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each night and from this the arithmetic progression, calculated that he would die on the day that he slept for 24 hours. *TIS
1849 Ruan Yuan was a Chinese scholar who wrote biographies of astronomers and mathematicians.*SAU 1852 Countess Augusta Ada King Lovelace (10 Dec 1815, 27 Nov 1852) (countess of Lovelace) English mathematician, the legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, was educated privately, studying mathematics and astronomy in addition to the more traditional topics. She seems to have developed an early ambition to be a famous scientist. After she met Charles Babbage in 1833, she began to assist in the development of his analytical engine and published notes on the work. She was one of the first to recognize the potential of computers and has been called the first computer programmer. (The programming language Ada is named after her.) Her other plans, such as a Calculus of the Nervous System, failed to mature - the obstacles in her way were simply too great. As a woman, for example, she was denied access to the Royal Society Library.*TIS (In 2009 and 2010, 24 March was commemorated by some as Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. The 2011 Ada Lovelace Day was on 7 October) 1873 Auguste-Arthur de La Rive (9 Oct 1801, 27 Nov 1873) Swiss physicist who was one of the founders of the electrochemical theory of batteries. He began experimenting with the voltaic cell (1836) and supported the idea of Michael Faraday that the electricity was the result of chemical reactions in the cell. He invented a prize-winning electroplating method to apply gold onto brass and silver. He determined the specific heat of various gases, examined the temperature of the Earth's crust, and made ozone from electrical discharge through oxygen gas. He was a contemporary of Faraday, Ampere and Oersted, with whom he exchanged correspondence on electricity.*TIS
His researches on the subject of electric discharge in rarefied gases led him to form a new theory of the aurora borealis.
Aurora-simulating machine designed by de la Rive, on display at the Musée d'histoire des sciences de la Ville de Genève.
1904 Paul Tannery (20 Dec 1843 in Mantes-la-Jolie, Yvelines, France - 27 Nov 1904 in Pantin, Seine-St Denis, France) His main contributions were to the history of Greek mathematics and to the philosophy of mathematics. He published a history of Greek science in 1887, a history of Greek geometry in the same year, and a history of ancient astronomy in 1893. Tannery did work of great importance as an editor of famous mathematics texts. He edited the work of Fermat in three volumes (jointly with C Henry) between 1891 and 1896. In addition he edited the work of Diophantus in two volumes (1893-95). He was an editor of the twelve volume complete works of Descartes Oeuvres de Descartes (1897-1913). Tannery became so skilled in using Greek numerals in his historical work that he believed that they had certain advantages over our present system. *SAU
1998 Moshé Flato (17 Sept 1937 in Tel Aviv, Israel (under British mandate) - 27 Nov 1998 in Paris, France) was a colorful mathematical physicist, with interests in groups, deformation theory and latterly, *-products. He pushed for the establishment of a European association of mathematical physics, which was never founded, but the momentum he created led to the foundation of the International Association of Mathematical Physics, IAMP. He also started the journal, Letters in Mathematical Physics, which is now well-established with a good reputation for the quality of its papers. I must admit that at the time, I was against founding a letters journal for mathematical physics, since the subject should not involve hasty publication of ideas so simple that they can be explained in a short article. However, I now think that it was a good idea, and leads to speedy progress in our subject. *Ray Streater
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
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