On This Day in Math - June 25

Astronomy was the cradle of the natural sciences and the starting point of geometrical theories.

~Cornelius Lanczos
 
EVENTS

1641 John Pell begins the work of expanding Walter Warner's table of anti-logarithms from 10,000 to 100,000 entries. Warner felt he was too old to complete the laborious task he had set for  himself, and offered Pell 40 GBPounds (appx. worth 5,000 pounds today) to complete the tables and make them ready for printing.  *Thomas Harriot's Doctrine of Triangular Numbers, Beery &Stedall, pg 39


1665  René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as a teacher for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be pneumonia—accustomed to working in bed until noon, he may have suffered a detrimental effect on his health due to Christina's demands for early morning study (the lack of sleep could have severely compromised his immune system). Others believe that Descartes may have contracted pneumonia as a result of nursing a French ambassador, Dejion A. Nopeleen, ill with the aforementioned disease, back to health. In his recent book, Der rätselhafte Tod des René Descartes (The Mysterious Death of René Descartes), the German philosopher Theodor Ebert asserts that Descartes died not through natural causes, but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest. He believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the poison because he feared Descartes's radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to Roman Catholicism by the monarch of Protestant Lutheran Sweden.*Wik

  After his death in Stockholm, his body was returned to Paris, arriving on 25 Jun 1665 , though the coffin had been looted by his followers for relics in Stockholm.  Supposedly, the coffin was shipped overland from Copenhagen to avoid piracy by English admirers!  The remains were in Ste. Geneviève, then in Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments, and then finally moved to St‑Germain-des-Prés in 1819. His headstone (or gravestone) is in St‑Germain‑des‑Prés, in the second chapel on the right of the apse.   Stephen Jay Gould says the (purported) skull of Descartes is in the Musée de l'Homme, apparently on display.  Arjen Dijksman recently advised me that the Musee de l'Homme is closed for another year, and there has been efforts to move the skull to the Pantheon. 

Église St-Germain-des-Prés, at 3 Place St-Germain-des-Prés, is the oldest church in Paris. Part of it dates to the 6th century, when a Benedictine abbey was founded on the site by King Childebert, son of Clovis. The church was originally built to house a relic of the True Cross brought from Spain in 542. The Normans destroyed the abbey on multiple occasions and only the marble columns in the triforium remain from the original structure. The carved capitals on the pillars are copies of the originals, which are kept in the Musée National du Moyen-Age. The church was enlarged and reconsecrated by Pope Alexander III in 1163. The abbey was completely destroyed during the Revolution, but the church was spared. The present building is a fine example of Romanesque architecture, with gothic interior elements. The square tower, dating from the early 11th century, is topped by a landmark spire, which dates to the 19th century.  For a time, the abbey served as a pantheon for Merovingian kings. The Chapelle Saint Symphorien, built during the Middle Ages and restored in 1981, served as the necropolis mérovingienne (crypt of the Merovingians). This is the presumed site of first tomb of Saint Germain, Bishop of Paris, who died in 576. Among the others interred here are King Jean-Casimir of Poland.

1712 Brook Taylor suggested that if two glass plates which are clamped together into a “V” are placed into a pan of water then capillary action will draw water up into the shape of a rectangular hyperbola with asymptotes the surface of the water and the point of the “V.” This and several similar experiments performed by Francis Hauksbee before the Royal Society caused Newton to rethink his ideas on capillary force. *VFR

1783  Antonie Lavoisier announced to the French Academy of Sciences that water was the product formed by the combination of hydrogen and oxygen. However, this discovery had been made earlier by the English chemist Henry Cavendish. *TIS


1795 Founding of the Bureau of Longitude in Paris. *VFR

BIRTHS
1864 Walther Hermann Nernst German who was one of the founders of modern physical chemistry. In 1889, he devised his theory of electric potential and conduction of electrolytic solutions (the Nernst Equation) and introduced the solubility product to explain precipitation reactions. In 1906, Nernst showed that it is possible to determine the equilibrium constant for a chemical reaction from thermal data, and in so doing he formulated what he himself called the third law of thermodynamics. This states that the entropy, (a thermodynamic measure of disorder in a system), approaches zero as the temperature goes towards absolute zero. For this, he was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1918, he explained the H₂-Cl₂ explosion on exposure to light as an atom chain reaction. *TIS

1879  Sir William Fothergill Cooke English inventor who worked with Charles Wheatstone in developing electric telegraphy. Of the pair, Cooke contributed a superior business ability, whereas Wheatstone is generally considered the more important of the two in the history of the telegraph. After Cooke attended a demonstration of the use of wire in transmitting messages, he began his own experiments with telegraphy (1836) and formed a partnership with Wheatstone. Their first patent (1837) was impractical because of cost. They demonstrated their five-needle telegraph on 24 July 1837 when they ran a telegraph line along the railway track from Euston to Camden Town able to transmit and successfully receive a message. In 1845, they patented a single-needle electric telegraph. *TIS

DEATHS
1671 Giovanni Battista Riccioli (17 April 1598 – 25 June 1671) Italian astronomer who was the first to observe (1650) a double star (two stars so close together that they appear to be one) - Mizar in Ursa Major, the middle star in the handle of the Big Dipper. He also discovered satellite shadows on Jupiter. In 1651, he assigned the majority of the lunar feature names in current use. He named the more prominent features after famous astronomers, scientists and philosophers, while the large dark and smooth areas he called "seas" or "maria". The lunar seas were named after moods (Seas of Tranquillity, Serenity) or terrestrial phenomena (Sea of Rains, Ocean or Storms) His map was published in Almagestum Novum in1651.*TIS
Riccioli studied seventy-seven objections to the Copernican thesis and after studying them Riccioli said that the weight of argument favored a “geo-heliocentric” hypothesis such as that advocated by the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Riccioli's preference for Tycho's model illustrates something important about how science is done. While today anti-Copernicans are often portrayed as Einstein characterized them (opposed to rational thinking, opposed to science), Riccioli, perhaps the most prominent of the anti-Copernicans, examined the available evidence diligently and rationally. The conclusion he reached was indeed wrong, but wrong because at that time neither the diffraction of light and the Airy disk, nor the details of the Coriolis effect, were understood. Riccioli's anti-Copernican arguments were so solid that they would become subjects of further investigation in physics, long after the Copernican theory had triumphed over the Tychonic theory.*Christopher M. Graney, Teaching Galileo, Physics Teacher V50,1

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1941 Alfred Pringsheim died. His work in Fourier series, analytic function theory, and continued fractions was a model of the Weierstrassian approach, although he was not a student of Weier­strass. *VFR

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1960 Walter Baade (24 Mar 1893; 25 Jun 1960 at age 67) German-American astronomer who, with Fritz Zwicky, proposed that supernovae could produce cosmic rays and neutron stars (1934), and Baade made extensive studies of the Crab Nebula and its central star. During WW II blackouts of the Los Angeles area Baade used the 100-inch Hooker telescope to resolve stars in the central region of the Andromeda Galaxy for the first time. This led to his definition of two stellar populations, to the realization that there were two kinds of Cepheid variable stars, and from there to a doubling of the assumed scale of the universe. Baade and Rudolph Minkowski identified and took spectrograms of optical counterparts of many of the first-discovered radio sources, including Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A. *TIS

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1974 Cornelius Lanczos (2 Feb 1893 - 25 June 1974) worked on relativity and mathematical physics and invented what is now called the Fast Fourier Transform. *SAU

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1978 Hsien Chung Wang worked on algebraic topology and discovered the 'Wang sequence', an exact sequence involving homology groups associated with fibre bundles over spheres. These discoveries were made while he worked with Newman in Manchester. Wang also solved, at that time, an important open problem in determining the closed subgroups of maximal rank in a compact Lie group. *SAU

1997 Jacques-Yves Cousteau French naval officer, oceanographer, marine biologist and ocean explorer, known for his extensive underseas investigations. He was co-inventor of the aqualung which made SCUBA diving possible (1943). Cousteau the developed the Conshelf series of manned habitats, the Diving Saucer, a process of underwater television and numerous other platforms and specialized instruments of ocean science. In 1945 he founded the French Navy's Undersea Research Group. He modified a WWII wooden hull minesweeper into the research vessel Calypso, in 1950. An observation dome added to the foot of Calypso's bow was found to increase the ship's stability, speed and fuel efficiency. *TIS2006

2006  Irving "Kap" Kaplansky was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada after his parents emigrated from Poland and attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. After receiving his Ph.D  from Harvard in 1941 as Saunders Mac Lane's first student, Kaplansky was professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1984. He was chair of the department from 1962 to 1967.
"Kap," as his friends and colleagues called him, made major contributions to group theory, ring theory, the theory of operator algebras and field theory. He published over 150 papers with over 20 co-authors. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 1984 to 1992, and the President of the American Mathematical Society from 1985 to 1986.
Kaplansky also was a noted pianist known to take part in Chicago performances of Gilbert and Sullivan productions. He often composed music based on mathematical themes. One of those compositions, A Song About Pi, is a melody based on assigning notes to the first 14 decimal places of pi.
Kaplansky was the father of singer-songwriter Lucy Kaplansky, who occasionally performs A Song About Pi in her act.
He was among the first five recipients of William Lowell Putnam fellowships in 1938.*Wik


Credits:
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History

On This Day in Math - June 24

For example is not a proof.  

Jewish proverb, 

EVENTS

1634 Gilles Personne de Roberval was proclaimed the winner of the triennial competition for the Ramus chair at the Coll`ege Royal in Paris. Thereafter, he kept his mathematical discoveries secret so that he could continue to win the competition and keep the chair. As a consequence he lost credit for many of his discoveries. *VFR
He worked on the quadrature of surfaces and the cubature of solids, which he accomplished, in some of the simpler cases, by an original method which he called the "Method of Indivisibles"; but he lost much of the credit of the discovery as he kept his method for his own use, while Bonaventura Cavalieri published a similar method which he independently invented. 
Another of Roberval’s discoveries was a very general method of drawing tangents, by considering a curve as described by a moving point whose motion is the resultant of several simpler motions. He also discovered a method of deriving one curve from another, by means of which finite areas can be obtained equal to the areas between certain curves and their asymptotes. To these curves, which were also applied to effect some quadratures, Evangelista Torricelli gave the name "Robervallian lines."

1644 In a letter to Torricelli, Fr. Marin Mersenne gives a method to find a number with any number of factors. He explained; since 60 = 2*2*3*5 subtract one from each factor (1,1,2, 4) and make them the exponents of any primes.. he used 2⁴*3²*5*7= 5040.. Of course Plato knew much earlier that 5040 had sixty factors.In Laws, Plato suggests that 5040 is the optimal number of citizens in a state because a) It is the product of 12, 20, and 21; b) the 12th part of it can still be divided by 12; and c) it has 59 proper divisors, including all numbers for 1 to 12 except 11, and 5038--which is very close to 5040--is divisible by 11.

1687 In a letter to Huygens, Fatio de Dullier used an integrating factor to solve the differential equation 3x dy − 2y dx = 0. No earlier instance of an integrating factor is known. The fundamental conception of integrating factors was due to Euler (1734) and further developed by Clairaut (1739). *VFR

In 1778, David Rittenhouse observed a total solar eclipse in Philadelphia. In a letter to him, dated 17 Jul 1778, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "We were much disappointed in Virginia generally on the day of the great eclipse, which proved to be cloudy." Rittenhouse (1732-1796) was not only an American astronomer, but also a mathematician and public official. He is reputed to have built the first American-made telescope and was the first director of the U.S. Mint (1792-1795).*TIS  Jefferson was an excellent applied mathematician and had contacted Rittenhouse on another occasion.  Travelling through France ten years later, " in 1788, he noticed peasants near Nancy ploughing, and fell to wondering about the design of the moldboard, that is, the surface which turns the earth: he spent the next ten years working on this, on and off, wondering how to achieve the most efficient design, both offering least frictional resistance, and which also would be easy for farmers out in the frontiers to construct, far from technical help. He consulted the Pennsylvania mathematician Robert Patterson (born in Ireland in 1743), and consulted also another Philadelphia luminary, the self-taught astronomer and mathematical instrument-maker David Rittenhouse (1732-1796)."   Jefferson also communicated with Thomas Paine about bridge design, suggesting the use of catenary arches.  Jefferson is believed to be the first person ever to use the term "catenary" in English. 

1847 The first observation with the Great Refractor at Harvard was of the Moon on the afternoon of June 24, 1847. A number of significant achievements quickly followed. The eighth satellite of Saturn was discovered in 1848 by W.C. Bond and his son, George P. Bond, who was to succeed his father as Director in 1859. In 1850, Saturn's crape, or inner, ring was first observed, again by the Bonds. That same year, the first daguerreotype ever made of a star, the bright Vega, was taken by J.A. Whipple working under W.C. Bond, following several years of experiments using smaller telescopes. One of the earliest photographs of a double star, Mizar and Alcor in the handle of the Big Dipper, was achieved in 1857, using the wet-plate collodion process. *Observatory web page...  The 15 inch Great Refractor was "once the biggest and best telescope in the United States, perhaps the world."  *Frederik Pohl, Chasing Science, pg 42.

In 1898, a U.S. commemorative stamp was first used that carried the design of a major engineering construction project, the Mississippi River Bridge, a triple-arch steel bridge between East St. Louis, Illinois and St. Louis,

Missouri. Each span was roughly 500 feet and rested on piers resting on bedrock some 100 feet beneath the river bottom. Opened on 4 Jul 1874, the bridge was named after its designer, the self-trained engineer, James Eads. The upper level road also carried streetcars, which are seen in the stamp design along with steam ships on the river below. The trains that ran on its lower level are hidden from view at this angle. (Although still in use, the bridge no longer carries rail traffic.) The design was reissued in 1998.*TIS

In 1975, a moon tremour, caused by a strike of Taurid meteors, was detected by the seismometer network left on the Moon's surface by American astronauts. The major series of lunar impacts between 22 - 26 Jun 1975 represented 5% of the total number of impacts detected during the eight years of the network's operation, and included numerous 1-ton meteorites. The impacts were detected only when the nearside of the Moon (where the astronauts landed) was facing the Beta Taurid radiant. At the same time, there was a lot of activity detected in Earth's ionosphere, which has been linked with meteor activity. The Taurid meteor storm crosses the Earth orbit twice a year, during the period 24 Jun to 6 Jul and the period 3 Nov to 15 Nov.*TIS

BIRTHS

1880 Oswald Veblen,  American mathematician, born in Decorah, Iowa, who made important contributions to differential geometry and early topology. Many of his contributions found application to atomic physics and relativity. Along with his interest in the foundations of geometry he developed an interest in algebraic topology, or analysis situs as it was then called and by 1912 was writing papers on this subject. Gradually he became more interested in differential geometry. From l922 onward most of his papers were in this area and in its connections with relativity. His work on axioms for differentiable manifolds and differential geometry contributed directly to the field.*TIS

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1909 William Penney (24 Jun 1909, 3 Mar 1991 at age 81)(Baron Penney of East Hendred) British nuclear physicist who led Britain's development of the atomic bomb. Penney was to Britain as Robert Oppenheimer was to the U.S. He was a prominent part of the British Mission at Los Alamos during WW II, where his principal assignment was studying the damage effects from the blast wave of the atomic bomb, but he became involved in implosion studies as well. Penney's combination of expertise, analytical skill, effective communication, and the ability to translate them into practical application soon made him one of the five members of the Los Alamos “brain trust” that made key decisions. He was the only Briton to be part of the ten man Target Committee that drew up the list of targets for the atomic bombing of Japan. *TIS

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1915 Sir Fred Hoyle English mathematician and astronomer, best known as the foremost proponent and defender of the steady-state theory of the universe. This theory holds both that the universe is expanding and that matter is being continuously created to keep the mean density of matter in space constant. He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on The Nature of the Universe, and he recalled coining the term "Big Bang" in the last of those talks. Although over time, belief in a "steady state" universe as Hoyle had proposed was shared by fewer and fewer scientists because of new discoveries, Hoyle never accepted the now most popular "Big Bang" theory for the origin of the universe.

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DEATHS

1832 Timofei Fedorovic Osipovsky (February 2, 1766–June 24, 1832) was a Russian mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. Timofei Osipovsky graduated from the St Petersburg Teachers Seminary.
He was to became a teacher at Kharkov University. Kharkov University was founded in 1805. The city of Kharkov, thanks to its educational establishments, became one of the most important cultural and educational centers of Ukraine. Osipovsky was appointed to Kharkov University in 1805, the year of the foundation of the University. In 1813 he became rector of the University. However in 1820 Osipovsky was suspended from his post on religious grounds.
His most famous work was the three volume book A Course of Mathematics (1801–1823). This soon became a standard university text and was used in universities for many years. *Wik

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1880 Jules Lissajous was a French mathematician best known for the Lissajous figures produced from a pair of sine waves. *SAU  The curves are also called Bowditch curves for the early American mathematician, Nathanial Bowditch,  who worked with them earlier.  In general, a parametric curve with equations x= A sin(k t ); y= B sin(m t), the curves can describe things as simple as a circle or ellipse to more complex open and closed curves.  If the ratio of k/m is rational, the curve will eventually close. 

Credits:

*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA

*TIS= Today in Science History

*Wik = Wikipedia

*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History

On This Day in Math - June 23

We can only see a short distance ahead,

but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Alan Turing, From his paper on the Turing test

EVENTS
1585 Thomas Harriot arrived off the coast of Virginia (actually Cape Lookout, NC). He was the first substantial mathematician to visit North America. [John W. Shirley in Thomas Harriot: A Biography, 1983, p. 129; Thanks to Kullman] *VFR Thomas Harriot's name was once synonymous with a common method of solving quadratics taught in nearly every high school. Once commonly called Harriot's Method, today it is simply referred to as factoring.
And how did he come to be in the exploration of Virginia?? Here is the story from Encyclopedia Virginia, 2010:

Thomas Hariot (often spelled Harriot) was an English mathematician, astronomer, linguist, and experimental scientist. During the 1580s, he served as Sir Walter Raleigh's primary assistant in planning and attempting to establish the English colonies on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. He taught Raleigh's sea captains to sail the Atlantic Ocean using sophisticated navigational methods not well understood in England at the time. He also learned the Algonquian language from two Virginia Indians, Wanchese and Manteo. In 1585, Hariot joined the expedition to Roanoke, which failed and returned to England the next year. During his stay in America, Hariot helped to explore the present-day Outer Banks region and, farther north, the Chesapeake Bay. He also collaborated with the artist John White in producing several maps notable at the time for their accuracy. Although Hariot left extensive papers, the only work published during his lifetime was "A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia", which evaluated the economic potential of Virginia. The report appeared most impressively in Theodor de Bry's 1590 edition that included etchings based on the White-Hariot maps and White's watercolors of Indian life. After a brief imprisonment in connection to the Gunpowder Plot (1605), Hariot calculated the orbit of Halley's Comet, sketched and mapped the moon, and observed sunspots. He died in 1621.

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1676 Newton, via Oldenburg, sent his famous Epistola prior to Leibniz. It contained the first use of fractional exponents as well as the newly discovered binomial theorem.*VFR

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In 1775, the first American-made book was advertised in Philadelphia, Penn. Titled Impenetrable Secret, the book was printed and sold by Story and Humphreys. Their advertisement in the Pennsylvania Mercury announced it was "printed with types, paper and ink manufactured in this Province."*TIS

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1835 Mobius receives a letter from Bellavitis with a method for adding and subtracting non-collinear vectors. (A history of vector analysis: the evolution of the idea of a vectorial system By Michael J. Crowe) A geometrical work by Bellavitis was published in 1832 which also contains vector type quantities. His basic objects are line segments AB and he considers AB and BA as two distinct objects. He defines two line segments as 'equipollent' if they are equal and parallel, so, in modern notation, two line segments are equipollent if they represent the same vector. Bellavitis then defines the 'equipollent sum of line segments' and obtains an 'equipollent calculus' which is essentially a vector space. *SAU

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1993 Over the course of three lectures delivered at Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences on June 21, 22, and 23 of 1993, Wiles announced his proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture, and hence of Fermat's Last Theorem. There was a relatively large amount of press coverage afterwards. After announcing his results, (Nick) Katz was a referee on his manuscript and he asked Wiles a series of questions that led Wiles to recognize that the proof contained a gap. There was an error in a critical portion of the proof which gave a bound for the order of a particular group: the Euler system used to extend Flach's method was incomplete. Wiles and his former student Richard Taylor spent almost a year resolving it. Wiles indicates that on the morning of September 19, 1994 he realized that the specific reason why the Flach approach would not work directly suggested a new approach with the Iwasawa theory which resolved all of the previous issues with the latter and resulted in a CNF that was valid for all of the required cases. On 6 October Wiles sent the new proof to three colleagues including Faltings. The new proof was published and, despite its size, widely accepted as likely correct in its major components. *Wik

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BIRTHS
1775 Étienne-Louis Malus (23 Jun 1775, 24 Feb 1812 at age 36)French physicist who discovered that light, when reflected, becomes partially plane polarized; i.e., its rays vibrate in the same plane. He served in Napoleon's corps of engineers, fought in Egypt, and contracted the plague during Napoleon's aborted campaign in Palestine. Posted to Europe after 1801, he began research in optics. In 1808, he discovered that light rays may be polarized by reflection, while looking through a crystal of Iceland spar at the windows of a building reflecting the rays of the Sun. He noticed that on rotating the crystal the light was extinguished in certain positions. Applying corpuscular theory, he argued that light particles have sides or poles and coined the word "polarization." *TIS

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1902 Dr. Howard T. Engstrom American computer designer who promoted the first commercially available digital computer, the Univac. As a Yale professor he had written a paper on the mathematical basis for cryptanalysis techniques. During WW II he was called to the Navy and placed in command of the OP-20-G automated machines "Research Section" for message decryption. After the war, he was a co-founder of Engineering Research Associates, a private company to work on electronic digital circuit technology for the Navy on a contract basis, with former Navy researchers. ERA delivered its first Atlas computer to the National Security Agency in Dec 1950. As vice president for research, Engstrom took the initiative to make a commercial version, renamed Univac.*TIS

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1912 Alan Mathison Turing born. This British mathematician was one of the founders of recursion theory, invented the Turing machine (an abstract model of a computer), did important work in cryptography, and invented the computer. *Alan Turing. The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, 1983.

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DEATHS
1891 Wilhelm Eduard Weber German physicist who investigated terrestrial magnetism. For six years, from 1831, Weber worked in close collaboration with Gauss. Weber developed sensitive magnetometers, an electromagnetic telegraph (1833) and other magnetic instruments during this time. His later work (1855) on the ratio between the electrodynamic and electrostatic units of charge proved extremely important and was crucial to Maxwell in his electromagnetic theory of light. (Weber found the ratio was 3.1074 x 108 m/sec but failed to take any notice of the fact that this was close to the speed of light.) Weber's later years were devoted to work in electrodynamics and the electrical structure of matter. The magnetic unit, weber, is named after him.*TIS

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1891 Norman Robert Pogson (23 Mar 1829; 23 Jun 1891 at age 62) English astronomer who devised the magnitude scale of the brightness of stars (1850) now in use. He divided the classical scale in which a first magnitude star is one hundred times brighter than a sixth magnitude star using five integer steps. Each step represents a fifth-root of 100 (about 2.512) increase in brightness. The Sun's magnitude on this scale is -26.91, whereby negative numbers denote objects brighter than first magnitude. Sirius is magnitude -1.58, Aldebaran is 1 and the faintest star detected is 30. His interest in astronomy began in his youth; by age 18 he had calculated orbits for two comets. He discovered 8 asteroids, 21 new variable stars and compiled a massive star catalogue. In 1860 he moved to India for the remainder of his life's work.*TIS

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1892 Pierre Ossian Bonnet died. He worked on minimal surfaces, geodesics, and integral geometry. *VFR  Bonnet made major contributions introducing the notion of geodesic curvature. A formula for the line integral of the geodesic curvature along a closed curve is known as the Gauss-Bonnet theorem. Gauss published a special case.

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Credits:
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History

On This Day in Math - June 22

The mathematical education of the young physicist [Albert Einstein ] was not very solid, which I am in a good position to evaluate since he obtained it from me in Zurich some time ago.

~Hermann Minkowski

EVENTS
1633 Galileo, under threat of torture from the inquisition, was forced to "abjure, curse, and detest" his Copernican heliocentric views.
The recantation of GALILEO took place in the Great Hall of the former monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, then the headquarters of the Dominican order. This is where he supposedly said "E pur si muove" (Nevertheless, it does move). For a long time, these words were believed to be a much later invention, but they probably date back to c1643 [Fahie, pp. 72 75]. Galileo was never officially imprisoned except for the few hours between his trial and the sentencing. In 1992, the Vatican officially declared that Galileo had been the victim of an error.

In 1675, the Royal Greenwich Observatory was created by Royal Warrant in England by Charles II. Building designed by Sir Christopher Wren (who was also a Professor of Astronomy) was commenced 10 Aug 1675 and finished the following year by John Flamsteed was appointed as the first Astronomer Royal. Its primary uses were in practical astronomy - navigation, timekeeping, determination of star positions. In 1767 the observatory began publishing The Nautical Almanac, which established the longitude of Greenwich as a baseline for time calculations. The almanac's popularity among navigators led in part to the adoption (1884) of the Greenwich meridian as the Earth's prime meridian (0° longitude) and the international time zones.*TIS

1799 France adopted the metric system of weights and measures. *VFR

1902 In response to a letter from Bertrand Russell dated 16 June 1902, Gottlob Frege responded with characteristic scientific honesty that “your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build arithmetic.” [van Heijenoort, From Frege to G¨odel, 125–128] *VFR
Russell had found a class of contradictions to Frege's 1879 Begriffsschrift. This contradiction can be stated as "the class of all classes that do not contain themselves as elements".

1978 evidence of the first moon of Pluto was discovered by astronomer James W. Christy of the Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. when he obtained a photograph of Pluto that showed the orb to be distinctly elongated.. Furthermore, the elongations appeared to change position with respect to the stars over time. After eliminating the possibility that the elongations were produced by plate defects and background stars, the only plausible explanation was that they were caused by a previously unknown moon orbiting Pluto at a distance of about 19,600 kilometers (12,100 miles) with a period of 6.4 days. The moon was named Charon, after the boatman in Greek mythology who took the souls of the dead across the River Styx to Pluto's underworld. *TIS

2004 Humans are officially slow learners... In 2004, a study led by Richard Doll was published in the British Medical Journal, the first research that quantified the damage over the lifetime of a generation, based on a 50-year study of a group of almost 35,000 British doctors who smoked. The study found that almost half of persistent cigarette smokers were killed by their habit, and a quarter died before age 70. Further, those who quit by age 30 had the same life expectancy as a nonsmoker. Even quitting at age 50 saved six more years of life over those who continued smoking. At age 80, 65% of non-smokers were still alive, but only 32% of smokers. Fifty years before, Doll published in the same journal the first report of a study that linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer*TIS

2011 One of the 15th century copies of a manuscript of Fibonacci's Liber Abacci that was owned by Boncompagni and was until recently in Brown University Maths library is for sale, by auction, on June 22, 2011, in New York and is estimated to fetch in excess of $120,000.

BIRTHS
1837 Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann born. He wrote (1892–1923) a five volume survey of the state of number theory including an evaluation of the various methods of proof. He also devoted time to composing, playing the piano, and serving as a music critic for various newspapers. *VFR

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1860 Mario Pieri (22 June 1860 in Lucca, Italy - 1 March 1913 in S Andrea di Compito (near Lucca), Italy) Pieri's main area was projective geometry and he is an important member of the Italian School of Geometers. However, after he moved to Turin, Pieri became influenced by Peano at the University and Burali-Forti who was a colleague at the Military Academy. This influence led Pieri to study the foundations of geometry.
In 1895 he set up an axiomatic system for projective geometry with three undefined terms, namely points, lines and segments. He improved on results of Pasch and Peano and then, in 1905, Pieri gave the first axiomatic definition of complex projective geometry which does not build on real projective geometry.
In 1898 Pieri published the memoir The principles of the geometry of position through the Academy of Sciences of Turin. Russell was impressed by this memoir and wrote, in his Principia, "This is, in my opinion, the best work on the present subject." *SAU

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1864 Herman Minkowski born. The motto on his Akademie-Schrift was “Rien n’est beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable” (Nothing is beautiful but the truth, only the truth is lovable). *VFR He developed the geometrical theory of numbers and who used geometrical methods to solve difficult problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity. By 1907, Minkowski realised that the work of Lorentz and Einstein could be best understood in a non-euclidean space. He considered space and time, which were formerly thought to be independent, to be coupled together in a four-dimensional "space-time continuum". Minkowski worked out a four-dimensional treatment of electrodynamics. His idea of a four-dimensional space (since known as "Minkowski space"), combining the three dimensions of physical space with that of time, laid the mathematical foundation of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.*TIS My favorite Minkowski story from Constance Reid's Hilbert, Once in a topology lecture he brought up the Four-color theorem. "This theorem has not been proved, but that is because only mathematicians of the third rank have occupied themselves with it" he announced with unusual arrogance. "I belive I can prove it." He began on the spot to work out the problem and continued over several classes to develop the work. After several weeks he entered one rainy day and a crash of thunder accompanied his entrance. Turning to his students he announced, "Heaven is angered by my arrogance, My proof is defective."

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1866 Kazimierz Żorawski (June 22, 1866 – January 23, 1953) was a Polish mathematician. His work earned him an honored place in mathematics alongside such Polish mathematicians as Wojciech Brudzewski, Jan Brożek (Broscius), Nicolas Copernicus, Samuel Dickstein, Stefan Banach, Stefan Bergman, Marian Rejewski, Wacław Sierpiński, Stanisław Zaremba and Witold Hurewicz.[citation needed]
Żorawski's main interests were invariants of differential forms, integral invariants of Lie groups, differential geometry and fluid mechanics. His work in these disciplines was to prove important in other fields of mathematics and science, such as differential equations, geometry and physics (especially astrophysics and cosmology).*Wik

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1880 Alfred Rosenblatt born. He worked in analysis and probability theory. *VFR

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1906 Ott-Heinrich Keller was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry and topology*SAU

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1910 Konrad Zuse, inventor of the first fully functional programmable digital computer. *VFR

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1920 James H. Pomerene American computer pioneer. In Apr 1946 he joined John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine in their newly organized Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This project was to build a parallel stored-program computer. He designed the adder portion of the arithmetic unit and then was entirely responsible for the development and construction of the electrostatic (Williams tube) memory and became the chief engineer of the project 1951-56. Then he joined IBM to assist development of the HARVEST computer, a special system built for the National Security Agency. It had two levels of program control and also had a tape and tape library system that was fully automatic and of great capacity.*TIS

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DEATHS

1389 Giovanni Dondi died. In 1381 he built one of the earliest geared equatoria driven by clockwork. There is a model of it in the Smithsonian. It has a heptagonal frame with a planet on each face. Dials show the time of sunrise, sunset, movable feasts, and the nodes of the moon’s orbit. *VFR

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1450  Jamshid al-Kashi was an Islamic mathematician who published some important teaching works and anticipated Stevin's work on decimals.*SAU

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1925 Felix Klein died. Curiously, this was the birthday of his dear friend Minkowski. *VFR German mathematician whose synthesis of geometry as the study of the properties of a space that are invariant under a given group of transformations, known as the Erlanger Programm, profoundly influenced mathematical development. He created the Klein bottle, a one-sided closed surface. A Klein bottle cannot be constructed in Euclidean space. It is best pictured as a cylinder looped back through itself to join with its other end. However this is not a continuous surface in 3-space as the surface cannot go through itself without a discontinuity. It is possible to construct a Klein bottle in non-Euclidean space.*TIS

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1936 Moritz Schlick, philosopher of science and leader of the Vienna Circle, was murdered by a deranged former student, on the steps of an academic building. *VFR

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1977 Harold Calvin Marston Morse developed variational theory in the large with applications to equilibrium problems in mathematical physics, a theory which is now called Morse theory and forms a vital role in global analysis*SAU

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1990 Ilya Mikhaylovich Frank Russian physicist who, with Tamm, theoretically explained the mechanism of Cherenkov radiation. In 1934, Cherenkov discovered that a peculiar blue light is emitted by charged particles traveling at very high speeds through water. Frank and Tamm provided the theoretical explanation of this effect, which occurs when the particles travel through an optically transparent medium at speeds greater than the speed of light in that medium. This discovery resulted in the development of new methods for detecting and measuring the velocity of high-speed particles and became of great importance for research in nuclear physics. For this, Frank received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1958 (jointly with Pavel A. Cherenkov and Igor Y. Tamm).*TIS

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Credits:
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History