Pat'sBlog

Sunday, 4 August 2013

On This Day in Math - August 4

Accurate reckoning: the entrance into knowledge of all existing things and all obscure secrets.
Ahmes the Scribe, Quoted in A B Chase, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (Reston Va. 1967)

The 216th day of the year; Since 216 = 3³ + 4³ + 5³ = 6³, it is the smallest cube that's also the sum of three cubes (Plato was among the first to notice this, and mentioned it in Book VIII of Republic). (What is the next cube that is the sum of three cubes?... and how can you be sure there will never be a day that is a cube that is the sum of two cubes?)
216 is also the sum of a twin prime (107 + 109).

EVENTS
In 1181, supernova seen in Cassiopia. First observed between August 4 and August 6, 1181, Chinese and Japanese astronomers recorded the supernova now known as SN 1181 in eight separate texts. One of only eight supernovae in the Milky Way observable with the naked eye in recorded history, it appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia and was visible in the night sky for about 185 days.*Wik

In 1693, champagne was invented by Dom Perignon.*(I'll drink to that.)

1597 Galileo wrote Kepler thanking him for the copy of Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum, which openly advocated the Copernican theory. Galileo admits he is also a Copernican. See 13 October 1597. *VFR Thanks to The Renaissance Mathematicus, for pointing out that when he received this letter, Kepler had never heard of Galileo. See more detail of this interesting story here.

1753 Euler, in a letter to Christian Goldbach, claimed that he had a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem for the case n = 3. He gave no proof in that letter and none was published until 1770 when he published his Elements of Algebra in Russian.*VFR Euler's proof was wrong, but other methods that Euler developed can be used to provide a correct proof. You can see Euler's incorrect proof, with an explanation by Graeme McRae.

1810 Gauss married his second wife, Minna Waldeck, who bore him two sons and a daughter. *VFR Sons Charles and Eugene both emigrated to America and died in Missouri. Therese died in Dresden. An interesting story about Eugene and his relations with his father and history in America is told here which I believe is the work of a Kevin Brown.

1811 Thomas Jefferson writes to Nicolas G. Dufief, to thank him for a French Dictionary, and adds, " I am anxious to get a copy of La Croix’s Cours de Mathematiques, (I believe it is in 7. vols) *Natl. Archives

1922 every telephone in North America was silent for one minute at sunset marking the time funeral services were taking place for Alexander Graham Bell. He was laid to rest in a tomb blasted in the solid rock at the peak of Beinn Bhreagh Mountain on his estate in Nova Scotia, Canada. A watch tower had been built there years earlier by the inventor. His coffin was made in the inventor's own workshop by his laboratory staff. In a memory of the famous inventor, all the switchboards and switching stations of AT&T and the Bell System in the U.S. and Canada suspended service to the 13 million telephones then installed. Bell had died two days earlier on 2 Aug 1922. *TIS

BIRTHS
1755 Nicolas-Jacques Conté (4 August 1755 – 6 December 1805) French inventor who devised a method of manufacturing pencil leads by mixing a finely powdered graphite with finely ground clay particles, baked, and used encased in wood. His innovation was prompted when imported plumbago supplies were disrupted by war. He was the first to use graphite - and that is still used as the basis for making pencil leads today. Using different ratios of clay to graphite varies the hardness of the pencil lead. He was commissioned by Napoleon as chief of the balloon corps in Egypt, where he invented ways to improvise tools and machines necessary to provide bread, cloth, munitions, surgical instruments and engineers' tools. As a youth, he had worked as a portrait painter. He lost his left eye in a chemistry laboratory accident*TIS

1795 Gouverneur Emerson (19 December, 1898 in Hardwick, Caledonia County, Vermont - 21 May, 1976 in Berlin, Vermont) American physician, statistician and agriculturalist who prepared a series of tables of deaths and causes in Philadelphia, during thirty years from 1807. These showed, for example, the excessive mortality of males during childhood. He began practice in Philadelphia on 4 Aug 1820, where yellow fever broke out a few weeks later, with 73 deaths by that fall. Emerson recorded cases, dates, locations, and outcomes. He concluded no current medical treatments was especially effective. When smallpox reappeared there, with 325 deaths in 1824, Emerson drafted a bill for control measures. There were only 6 cases of smallpox in the city in 1825, and 3 in 1826. In retirement, he turned to peach culture, and studied phosphate and guano fertilizers.*TIS

1805 Sir William Rowan Hamilton (Many think the correct birthdate is August 3 but his gravestone has Aug 4. The confusion arises from the fact he was born very near midnight.) Irish mathematician in the fields of optics, geometrics, and classical mechanics. By age 12, Hamilton had already learned fourteen languages when he met the American, Zerah Colburn, who could perform amazing mental arithmetical feats, and they joined in competitions. It appears that losing to Colburn sparked Hamilton's interest in mathematics. At 15, he began studied the works of LaPlace and Newton so by age 17 had become the greatest living mathematician. He contributed to the development of optics, dynamics, and algebra. His invention of the calculus of quaternions enabled a three-dimensional algebra or geometry which provided a basis for the later development of quantum mechanics. *TIS
Hamilton describes his memory of the discovery of the Quaternions to his son,
"Every morning in the early part of the above-cited month, on my coming down to breakfast, your (then) little brother, William Edwin, and yourself, used to ask me, `Well, papa, can you multiply triplets?' Whereto I was always obliged to reply, with a sad shake of the head: `No, I can only add and subtract them. But on the 16th day of the same month (Oct) - which happened to be Monday, and a Council day of the Royal Irish Academy - I was walking in to attend and preside, and your mother was walking with me along the Royal Canal, to which she had perhaps driven; and although she talked with me now and then, yet an undercurrent of thought was going on in my mind which gave at last a result, whereof it is not too much to say that I felt at once the importance. An electric circuit seemed to close; and a spark flashed forth the herald (as I foresaw immediately) of many long years to come of definitely directed thought and work by myself, if spared, and, at all events, on the part of others if I should even be allowed to live long enough distinctly to communicate the discovery. Nor could I resist the impulse - unphilosophical as it may have been - to cut with a knife on a stone of Brougham Bridge, as we passed it, the fundamental formula which contains the Solution of the Problem, but, of course, the inscription has long since mouldered away. A more durable notice remains, however, on the Council Books of the Academy for that day (October 16, 1843), which records the fact that I then asked for and obtained leave to read a Paper on `Quaternions,' at the First General Meeting of the Session; which reading took place accordingly, on Monday, the 13th of November following.'' *from Hamilton By Sir Robert Stawell Ball.

1834 John Venn born (4 August 1834 – 4 April 1923) in Hull, England. He is best known for the diagrams that he presented in his Symbolic Logic (1881). Leibniz was the ﬁrst to systematically use geometric diagrams to represent syllogisms, and Euler developed the ideas, but Venn gets the credit for his book popularized them. *VFR He was a fellow of Gonville and Caius and there is a stained glass window memorial there in the dining hall, which I had the pleasure of visiting with Professor Anthony Edwards.

1837 Birthdate of E. L. W. Maximilian Curtze, (4 August 1837 in Ballenstedt- February 1903) expert on medieval mathematical texts. His work was aided by his excellent knowledge of the current mathematical literature, unusual talent for languages, and skill in deciphering hard-to-read handwriting. *VFR

1893 Francis Dominic Murnaghan (1873–1976) was an Irish mathematician, former head of the mathematics department at Johns Hopkins University. His name is attached to developments in group theory and mathematics applied to continuum mechanics (Murnaghan and Birch–Murnaghan equations of state).*SAU

1909 Saunders MacLane, (4 August 1909, Taftville, Connecticut – 14 April 2005, San Francisco) Saunders Mac Lane was an American mathematician who worked in cohomology and category theory, but who is best known for the algebra book he wrote with Garrett Birkhoff.*SAU

1912 Aleksandr Danilovic Aleksandrov 4 Aug 1912 in Volyn, Ryazan, Russia - 27 July 1999) "approached the differential geometry of surfaces [by extending the notion of objects studied], extending the class of regular convex surface with the class of all convex surface .... To solve concrete problems Aleksandrov had to replace the Gaussian geometry of regular surfaces with a more general theory. In the first place the intrinsic properties (ie, the properties appear as a result of measurements carried out surface) of an arbitrary convex surface has been studied, and methods to be found for verification of theorems on the connection between the real and external properties of convex surfaces. Aleksandrov constructed a theory of intrinsic geometry on the convex basis. Due to the depth of this theory, the importance of its applications and the breadth of his statement, Aleksandrov comes second only to Gauss in the history of the development of the theory of surfaces." *from Math.info

DEATHS
1812 Georg Klügel (August 19, 1739 – August 4, 1812) was a German mathematician who wrote a Dictionary of Mathematics.*SAU

1874 Ludwig Otto Hesse (22 April 1811 – 4 August 1874) worked on the development of the theory algebraic functions and the theory of invariants. He is remembered particularly for introducing the Hessian determinant.*SAU

1900 (Jean-Joseph-) Étienne Lenoir (12 January 1822 - 4 August 1900) was a Belgian inventor who devised the world's first commercially successful internal-combustion engine. He moved to Paris where his work with electro-plating led him to other electrical inventions, among them a railway telegraph. Lenoir patented his first engine in 1860. Looking much like a double-acting steam engine, it fired an uncompressed charge of air and illuminating gas with an ignition system of his own design. One of these engines powered a road vehicle in 1863; another ran a boat. Because of improved designs by Nikolaus Otto and other inventors, the Lenoir engine became obsolete and only about 500 Lenoir engines were built. The Lenoir engine wasn't efficient enough, and the inventor died poor. *TIS

1906 Joseph Tilly was a Belgian soldier who published works on non-Euclidean geometry.*SAU

1920 Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Rohn (January 25, 1855 - August 4, 1920) In 1884 Rohn was promoted to extraordinary professor at Leipzig, then in 1887 he became a full professor at Technische Hochschule in Dresden where he held the chair of descriptive geometry. Felix Klein lectured during his visit to the United States in Evanston between 28 August and 9 September 1893. During these lectures he spoke about various models of the Kummer surface. He said that Rohn's work on this topic was the most significant. One of Rohn's models for the Kummer surface uses the generating lines on a hyperboloid of one sheet. He then took four lines from each of the two sets of generators, shaded the alternate regions, and then glued a copy of the shaded regions to the original along the boundary. In this way he produced a closed surface without boundary having sixteen real nodal points. He published this construction in 1881 and gave more details in an 1887 paper. Burau writes : In these early writings he demonstrated his ability to work out connections between geometric and algebraic- analytic relations. In the following years, Rohn further developed these capacities and became an acknowledged master in all questions concerning the algebraic geometry of the real P2 and P3, where it is possible to overlook the different figures. This concerns forms of algebraic curves and surfaces up to degree four, linear and quadratic congruences, and complexes of lines in P3. Gifted with a strong spatial intuition, Rohn possessed outstanding ability to select geometric facts from algebraic relations.
His love of geometry is also illustrated by his beautiful thread models which were especially produced to excite the curiosity of the uninitiated. Rohn constructed models of surfaces and space curves that he was studying, particularly in the early part of his career. In 1884 the Jablonowski Society proposed as prize problem asking for essays on the general surface of order 4, extending the work of Schläfli, Klein and Zeuthen on cubic surfaces; they awarded the prize to Rohn for his essay in 1886. He made important contributions to the theory of quartic surfaces, in particular of ruled quartics and quartics with a triple point. He also showed that the maximum number of separated ovals possible for a quartic surface is ten. He published Die Flächen vierter Ordnung hinsichtlich ihrer Knotenpunkte und ihrer Gestaltung: Gekrönte Preisschrift (1886). Rohn was made rector of the Technical University of Dresden during 1900-01. As rector he gave a speech on 23 April 1900 to celebrate the birthday of His Majesty the King. His speech was entitled Die Entwickelung der Raumanschauung im Unterricht and it was published by the Technical University of Dresden in 1900. In Dresden, Rohn gave the course 'Darstellende Geometrie' in the summer of 1904. It was the last session that he lectured at Dresden for in the following year he was appointed to the University of Leipzig. From 1 April 1905 until his death, Rohn held the chair of mathematics at the University of Leipzig. *SAU

1945 Gerhard Gentzen (November 24, 1909, Greifswald, Germany – August 4, 1945, Prague, Czechoslovakia) invented a 'natural deduction' which provided a logic closer to mathematical reasoning than the systems proposed by Frege, Russell and Hilbert.*SAU He had his major contributions in the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. *Wik

2009 Professor James "Jim" Wiegold (15 April 1934 – 4 August 2009) was a Welsh mathematician. He earned a PhD at the University of Manchester in 1958, studying under Bernhard Neumann, and is most notable for his contributions to group theory.*Wik

Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell

Saturday, 3 August 2013

On This Day in Math - August 3

There are surely worse things than being wrong,
and being dull and pedantic are surely among them.

Mark Kac

The 215th day of the year; There are 215 sequences of four (not necessarily distinct)integers, counting permutations of order as distinct, such that the sum of their reciprocals is 1. Obviously, one of them is 1/4+1/4+1/4+1/4=1. How many can you find?

EVENTS
431 BC Oldest European record of a verifiable solar eclipse (annular), by the Greek historian Thucydides. *NSEC

1492 Old School mneumonic "In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Columbus set out from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on this day. I always reminded my students of the perils of memorization with the line:
"In Fourteen hundred ninety-three, Columbus sailed the deep blue sea" *PB

1596 David Fabricus (also spelled Fabricius) of Germany discovered that the star Mira varied in brightness. In 1638 Johann Holwarda of Germany determined its period, and Mira became the first periodic variable star discovered. However, a few stars of variable brightness were discovered earlier by Chinese and Korean astronomers, who mistakenly identified them as novae.*Access Science
A nice piece on Fabricius life and unusual death are at the Renaissance Mathematicus.

1747 Diderot and d’Alembert replace de Gua, who had earlier done much to systematize analytic geometry, as director of the publishing project which was to become the celebrated Encyclop´edie*VFR

1750 The ﬁrst (U.S.) teaching methods book was completed by Christopher Dock. It was originally written in German and was printed twenty years later in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The preface was dated March 27, 1770. The full title was: “Schul-ordnung; or A Simple and Thoroughly Prepared School-Management clearly setting forth not only in what manner children may best be taught the branches usually given at school, but also how they may be well instructed in the knowledge of godliness.” *VFR

1872 Charles A. Young (US) observes a flare on the Sun with a spectroscope; he calls attention to its coincidence with a magnetic storm on Earth. *NSEC

In 1903, Thomas Edison's opinion of radium was quoted within an article in the New York World newspaper. "I have had several pieces of it from Mme. Curie in Paris, and I have experimented with it. I do not see its commercial utility, but it opens up a great field of thought and scientific research. It overturns all the old theories of force and energy... I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly."

1953 In honor of the 7th International Congress of History of Science, which was held in Jerusalem, August 4-11, 1953, Israel issued a stamp picturing Maimonides, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204), a Jewish philosopher especially interested in the work of Aristotle. [Scott #74]. *VFR

1958 The First ship to reach the North Pole was the submarine Nautilus, which reached 90 degrees North enroute from Hawaii to the Atlantic Ocean.*VFR In 1958, the USS Nautilus (SSN571), became the first submarine to travel under the geographic North Pole when the ice-pack conditions were favorable. This was the first atomic-powered submarine in the U.S. Navy. Attempts earlier in the year failed due to the ice-pack conditions. The crew created a post office while under the North Pole and canceled their letters with a home-made North Pole Stamp. (The Post Master General later declared it to be a legal post office.) Santa Claus boarded through one of the forward torpedo tubes and complained about the effect on his lawn. *TIS

1977 Radio Shack announces TRS-80 computer... This was the first computer I ever owned, and my son and I learned to program together on one.(He has gone on to be quite a capable programer)
Radio Shack announces its TRS-80 Model I, the company's first personal computer. Equipped with 4KB of RAM, cassette-tape storage, and a built-in BASIC interpreter, the TRS-80 was one of the first mass-marketed personal computer (along with the Commodore PET and Apple II). At a time when most microcomputers came in kit form and appealed to hobbyists, these three computers addressed the average person and were very popular in schools Radio Shack sold more than 200,000 TRS-80 computers.*chm

BIRTHS

1805 William Rowan Hamilton born. The date on his tombstone is 4 August 1805, the confusion being due to the fact that he was born at midnight.*VFR
Sir William Rowan Hamilton (3 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, who made important contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra. His studies of mechanical and optical systems led him to discover new mathematical concepts and techniques. His greatest contribution is perhaps the reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In mathematics, he is perhaps best known as the inventor of quaternions. Hamilton is said to have shown immense talent at a very early age, prompting astronomer Bishop Dr. John Brinkley to remark in 1823 of Hamilton at the age of 18: “This young man, I do not say will be, but is, the first mathematician of his age.”

William Rowan Hamilton's scientific career included the study of geometrical optics, classical mechanics, adaptation of dynamic methods in optical systems, applying quaternion and vector methods to problems in mechanics and in geometry, development of theories of conjugate algebraic couple functions (in which complex numbers are constructed as ordered pairs of real numbers), solvability of polynomial equations and general quintic polynomial solvable by radicals, the analysis on Fluctuating Functions (and the ideas from Fourier analysis), linear operators on quaternions and proving a result for linear operators on the space of quaternions (which is a special case of the general theorem which today is known as the Cayley–Hamilton theorem). Hamilton also invented "Icosian Calculus", which he used to investigate closed edge paths on a dodecahedron that visit each vertex exactly once. *Wik

1811 Elisha Otis (August 3, 1811 – April 8, 1861) American inventor of the automatic safety brake for elevators, which later made high-rise buildings practical. Before this invention, elevators of his time were extremely dangerous. In 1852, he was employed at a New York bed factory. He realized the need for a "safety elevator" to move people and equipment safely to the upper floors of the building. He strikingly demonstrated his solution at the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York in 1854. In front of a large crowd, Otis ascended in his new elevator. He called for the elevator's cable to be cut with an axe, but the elevator platform did not fall. The brake he invented used toothed guiderails in the elevator shaft and a spring-loaded bar that automatically caught in the toothed rail if the elevator car if the cable failed. *TIS

1835 Artemas Martin (August 3, 1835; Steuben County, New York - November 7, 1918
Washington, DC) was a self-taught mathematician and book-collector whose output covered a wide range of mathematical problems. *SAU Martin was a prolific contributor of problems and solutions to mathematical puzzle columns in popular magazines beginning at the age of 18 in the Pittsburgh Almanac and the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. From 1870 to 1875, he was editor of the "Stairway Department" of Clark's School Visitor, one of the magazines to which he had previously contributed. From 1875 to 1876 Martin moved to the Normal Monthly, where he published 16 articles on diophantine analysis. He subsequently became editor of the Mathematical Visitor in 1877 and of the Mathematical Magazine in 1882.
Martin maintained an extensive mathematical library, now in the collections of American University. *Wik He was one of the early writers on "Pursuit curves".

1851 George Francis FitzGerald (3 August 1851 – 22 February 1901) Irish physicist whose suggestion of a way to produce waves helped lay a foundation for wireless telegraphy. He also first developed a theory, independently discovered by Hendrik Lorentz, that a material object moving through an electromagnetic field would exhibit a contraction of its length in the direction of motion. This is now known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, which Einstein used in his own special theory of relativity. He also was first to propose the structure of comets as a head made of large stones, but a tail make of such smaller stones (less than 1-cm diam.) that the pressure of light radiation from the sun could deflect them. FitzGerald also studied electrolysis as well as electromagnetic radiation.*TIS

1914 Mark Kac (pronounced kahts, Polish: Marek Kac, b. 3 August 1914, Krzemieniec, Russian Empire, now in Ukraine; d. 26 October 1984, California, USA) was a Polish mathematician. His main interest was probability theory. His question, "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" set off research into spectral theory, with the idea of understanding the extent to which the spectrum allows one to read back the geometry. (In the end, the answer was "no", in general.)*Wik

1926 Maurice Auslander (August 3, 1926 – November 18, 1994) was an American mathematician who worked on commutative algebra and homological algebra. He proved the Auslander–Buchsbaum theorem that regular local rings are factorial, the Auslander–Buchsbaum formula, and introduced Auslander–Reiten theory and Auslander algebras.*Wik

DEATHS
1914 Louis Couturat (17 Jan 1868 in Ris-Orangis (near Paris), France - 3 Aug 1914 in Between Ris-Orangis and Melun, France), a logician whose historical researches led to the publication of Leibniz’s logical works in 1903.*VFR Couturat was killed in a car accident, his car being in hit by the car carrying the orders for mobilization of the French army the day World War I broke out. Ironically he was a noted pacifist. *SAU

1917 Georg Frobenius (October 26, 1849 – August 3, 1917) German mathematician who made major contributions to group theory, especially the concept of abstract groups (with Ludwig Stickleberger) and the theory of finite groups of linear substitutions (with Issai Schur), that later found important uses in the theory of finite groups as it applies to quantum mechanics. He also contributed to means of solving linear homogenous differential equations. The fact so many of Frobenius's papers read like present day text-books on the topics which he studied is a clear indication of the importance that his work, in many different areas, has had in shaping the mathematics which is studied today.*TIS

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

Friday, 2 August 2013

On This Day in Math - August 2

The whole form of mathematical thinking was created by Euler. It is only with the greatest of difficulty that one is able to follow the writings of any author preceding Euler, because it was not yet known how to let the formulas speak for themselves. This art Euler was the first to teach.

Ferdinand Rudio

The 214th day of the year; The 11th perfect number 2¹⁰⁶ (2¹⁰⁷−1) has 214 divisors. Also, 214*412+1 is prime. *Prime Curios

EVENTS
1133 The last total solar eclipse at Jerusalem took place on August 2, 1133 . The next total solar eclipses will be on August 8, 2241. *NSEC

1733 Benjamin Franklin suggest writers could improve their literary style if they learned a little Geometry in The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 2, 1733. "If a Writer would persuade, he should proceed gradually from Things already allow’d, to those from which Assent is yet with-held, and make their Connection manifest. .... Perhaps a Habit of using good Method, cannot be better acquired, than by learning a little Geometry or Algebra. " *Natl. Archives

In 1870, Tower Subway, the first tube railway in the world, was opened under the River Thames in London, England. Engineer James Henry Greathead used a tunnelling shield he modified from Barlow's design to bore the 6-ft diameter tunnel near the Tower of London. It opened with steam operated lifts and a 12-seat carriage shuttled from end to end by wire rope powered by a steam engine. It was not successful due to low use and frequent breakdowns, and the railway closed within three months (Nov 1870). The tunnel was converted to a foot tunnel with stairs. It was closed in 1894 when the opening of the nearby Tower Bridge made it redundant. The tunnel now holds water mains and fibre optic cables.*TIS

1876 The dead man's hand is a two-pair poker hand, namely "aces and eights". This card combination gets its name from a legend that it was the five-card-draw hand held by Wild Bill Hickok, when he was murdered on August 2, 1876, in Saloon No. 10 at Deadwood, South Dakota. "Wild Bill" Hickok was shot and killed by a drunken stranger at a poker table in Nuttall & Mann's Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood on August 2, 1876. Hickok had come to the Black Hills to explore the gold fields there, leaving his wife in Cincinnati. High School students should be able to find the probability of getting “the Dead Man’s hand” in a five card hand delt from a standard 52 card deck. *PB

In 1880, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was adopted officially by Parliament. Greenwich had been the national centre for time since 1675. GMT was originally set-up to aid naval navigation, but was not was used on land until transportation improved. In the 1840 's with the introduction of the railways there was a need in Britain for a national time system to replace the local time adopted by major towns and cities. (Thony Christie wrote to tell me that Edmund Halley had used Greenwich as 0 degree on a map in 1738)
GMT was adopted by the U.S. at noon on 18 Nov 1883 when the telegraph lines transmitted time signals to all major cities. Prior to that there were over 300 local times in the USA. GMT was adopted worldwide on 1 Nov 1884 when the met International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, USA and 24 time zones created.*TIS "The first printed chart or map known to have used Greenwich as its Prime Meridian was published in 1738. The Bradley Meridian not only defined the Zero of longitude for the first Ordnance Survey map published in 1801, but also remains the Zero Meridian used by the Ordnance Survey today." (This is about six meters west of the line agreed to in 1884 which is defined by the Airy Meridian now visited regularly by thousands (pb)) *The Greenwich Meridian

1932 Carl D. Anderson discovered the positron in 1932, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936. Anderson also coined the term positron. The positron was the first evidence of antimatter and was discovered when Anderson allowed cosmic rays to pass through a cloud chamber and a lead plate. A magnet surrounded this apparatus, causing particles to bend in different directions based on their electric charge. The ion trail left by each positron appeared on the photographic plate with a curvature matching the mass-to-charge ratio of an electron, but in a direction that proved its charge was positive.
Anderson wrote in retrospect that the positron could have been discovered earlier based on Chung-Yao Chao 's work, if only it had been followed up. *Wik

1939 Albert Einstein “wrote” President F. D. Roosevelt that “Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard ... leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. ... This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may be constructed.”
The letter, drafted by Fermi, Szilard, and Wigner and seems not to have actually been signed by Einstein until August 10, and was then given to Alexander Sachs, a confident of Roosevelt, who did not deliver it to him until October 30. Roosevelt quickly started the Manhattan Project. Einstein later regretted signing this letter. *(VFR & Brody & Brody); (the letter can be read at Letters of Note) They recognized the process could generate a lot of energy leading to power and possibly weapons. There was also concern the Nazi government of Germany was already searching for an atomic weapon. This letter would accomplish little more than the creation of a "Uranium Committee" with a budget of $6,000 to buy uranium and graphite for experiments.
Sir Fred Soddy's book, The Interpretation of Radium, inspired H G Wells to write The World Set Free in 1914, and he dedicated the novel to Soddy's book. Twenty years later, Wells' book set Leo Szilard to thinking about the possibility of Chain reactions, and how they might be used to create a bomb, leading to his getting a British patent on the idea in 1936. A few years later Szilard encouraged his friend, Albert Einstein , to write a letter to President Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb. The prize-winning science-fiction writer, Frederik Pohl , talks about Szilard's epiphany in Chasing Science (pg 25),
".. we know the exact spot where Leo Szilard got the idea that led to the atomic bomb. There isn't even a plaque to mark it, but it happened in 1938, while he was waiting for a traffic light to change on London's Southampton Row. Szilard had been remembering H. G. Well's old science-fiction novel about atomic power, The World Set Free and had been reading about the nuclear-fission experiment of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the lightbulb went on over his head."

2012 First of two full moons in a single month, August 2, August 31. August will have a "blue moon" on August 31 The last month with two full moons was March of 2010 on March 1 and March 30. The next month with a blue moon will be in the following month, September of 2012. After that, you have to wait until July of 2015.
(The Farmer's Almanac uses a different notation for "blue moon", the third full moon in a season of four full moons.)*Wik

BIRTHS1754 Pierre-Charles L'Enfant (August 9, 1754 - June 14, 1825 (aged 70))French-born and educated as an architect, L'Enfant came to the U.S. as a French engineer who assisted the American Continental Army in its fight against the British during the American Revolution. Appointed by President Washington in 1791 to design the new federal city, L'Enfant designed the basic plan for Washington, D.C., based on many European cityscapes. L'Enfant was dismissed from his job in 1792 following professional disagreements and personality clashes with the three commissioners appointed by President Washington to oversee the project.*TIS

1820 John Tyndall FRS (2 August 1820 – 4 December 1893) was a prominent 19th century physicist. His initial scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he studied thermal radiation, and produced a number of discoveries about processes in the atmosphere. He was the first to prove the "Greenhouse Theory" of the Earth's atmosphere. Tyndall published seventeen books, which brought state-of-the-art 19th century experimental physics to a wider audience. From 1853 to 1887 he was professor of physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. *Wik

1835 Elisha Gray (August 2, 1835 – January 21, 1901) was a U.S. scientist and innovator who would have been known to us as the inventor of the telephone if Alexander Graham bell hadn't got to the patent office before him earlier that day, resulting in a famous legal battle. He subsequently joined Western Electric where he designed the telegraph printer, the answer-back call-box of the A.D.T. System, and the needle annunciator, among other inventions. He also goes down in history as the accidental creator of the first electronic musical instrument using his discovery of the basic single note oscillator and design of a simple loudspeaker device.*TIS
It is interesting that Bell died on the date of Gray's birth.

1856 Ferdinand Rudio (2 Aug 1856 in Wiesbaden, Germany - 21 June 1929 in Zürich, Switzerland)worked on group theory, algebra and geometry. He is best remembered for his work in the history of mathematics, in particular he wrote a major article on squaring the circle and he also wrote biographies of mathematicians.
One of his most important contributions to mathematics was editing the collected works of Euler. Rudio proposed the project in 1883 since this was the centenary of Euler's death. He continued to advocate the importance of this project and at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Zurich in 1897 he suggested it would be a suitable memorial for the year 1907 which was the bicentennial of Euler's birth. The project was not approved until 1909, twenty six years after Rudio first proposed it.
Rudio was appointed general editor for the project. He edited two volumes himself and collaborated in the editing of three more. In fact he supervised the production of over 30 volumes in his role as general editor. *SAU

1887 Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson (2 August 1887, Minsk, Belarus – 12 February 1960, Munich, Germany) was a German-Russian mathematician. He was most famously known for his work on mathematical statistics.Anderson was born from a German family in Minsk (now in Belarus), but soon moved to Kazan (Russia), on the edge of Siberia. His father, Nikolai Anderson, was professor in Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Kazan. His older brothers were the folklorist Walter Anderson and the astrophysicist Wilhelm Anderson. Oskar Anderson graduated from Kazan Gymnasium with a gold medal in 1906. After studying mathematics for one year at University of Kazan, he moved to St. Petersburg to study economics at the Polytechnic Institute. From 1907 to 1915, he was Aleksandr Chuprov's assistant. In 1912 he started lecturing at a commercial school in St. Petersburg. In 1918 he took on a professorship in Kiev but he was forced to flee Russia in 1920 due to the Russian Revolution, first taking a post in Budapest (Hungary) before becoming a professor at the University of Economics at Varna (Bulgaria) in 1924. In 1935 he was appointed director of the Statistical Institute for Economic Research at the University of Sofia and in 1942 he took up a full professorship of statistics at the University of Kiel, where he was joined by his brother Walter Anderson after the end of the second world war. In 1947 he took a position at the University of Munich, teaching there until 1956, when he retired.*Wik

1902 Mina Spiegel Rees (2 August 1902 - 25 October 1997) was an American mathematician. She was the first female President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1971) and head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research of the United States. She was valedictorian at Hunter College High School in New York City.[1] She graduated Summa cum Laude with a math major at Hunter College in 1923. She received a masters in mathematics from Columbia University in 1925. At that time she was told unofficially that "the Columbia mathematics department was not really interested in having women candidates for Ph.D's". She started teaching at Hunter College then took a sabbatical to study for the doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1929. She earned her doctorate in 1931 with a thesis on "Division algebras associated with an equation whose group has four generators," published in the American Journal of Mathematics, Vol 54 (Jan. 1932), 51-65. Her advisor was Leonard Dickson. *Wik
She became one of the earliest female computer pioneers. Before her death in 1997, Rees would leave her mark in the worlds of computers, mathematics, and education. Rees graduated with degrees in mathematics from Hunter College and Columbia University and ran the Office of Naval Research (ONR) after World War II, where she organized work on early computers such as the Harvard Mark I. Throughout her career, she made many important contributions to the use of computers in solving applied mathematical problems and was known for her strong administrative skills and influence. *CHM

1971 Ruth Elke Lawrence-Naimark (2 August 1971, Bristol, UK; ) is an Associate Professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology. Lawrence's 1990 paper, Homological representations of the Hecke algebra, in Communications in Mathematical Physics, introduced, among other things, certain novel linear representations of the braid group — known as Lawrence–Krammer representation. In papers published in 2000 and 2001, Daan Krammer and Stephen Bigelow established the faithfulness of Lawrence's representation. This result goes by the phrase "braid groups are linear." Outside academia, she is best known for being a child prodigy in mathematics. She passed the GCSE in Math at age five, and in 1981 she passed the Oxford University interview entrance examination in mathematics, coming first out of all 530 candidates sitting the examination, and joining St Hugh's College in 1983 at the age of just twelve.*Wik

DEATHS

1823 Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, Comte Carnot (13 May 1753 – 2 August 1823) died. Carnot is best known as a geometer. In 1803 he published Géométrie de position in which sensed magnitudes were first systematically used in geometry.*Wik

1922 Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) Scottish inventor of the telephone died in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia. Born in 1847, Bell's career was influenced by his grandfather (who published The Practical Elocutionist and Stammering and Other Impediments of Speech), his father (whose interest was the mechanics and methods of vocal communication) and his mother (who was deaf). As a teenager, Alexander was intrigued by the writings of German physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz, On The Sensations of Tone. At age 23 he moved to Canada. In 1871, Bell began giving instruction in Visible Speech at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. This background set his course in developing the transmission of voice over wires. *TIS

1962 John Smith graduated from Glasgow University and then stayed on as a lecturer. He taught at Campbeltown Grammar School and Dollar Academy and then became an HM Schools Inspector. *SAU

1976 László Kalmár (March 27, 1905 – August 2, 1976) worked on mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. He was ackowledged as the leader of Hungarian mathematical logic. *SAU

Thursday, 1 August 2013

On This Day in Math - August 1

Regarding all these basic topics in infinitesimal calculus which we teach today as canonical requisites ... the question is never raised, "Why so?" or "How does one arrive at them?" Yet all these matters must at one time have been goals of an urgent quest, answers to burning questions, at the time, namely, when they were created. If we were to go back to the origins of these ideas, they would lose that dead appearance of cut-and-dried facts and instead take on fresh and vibrant life again.
Otto Toeplitz - The calculus : A genetic approach (Chicago, 1963)

This is the 213th day of the year; 213 is a square free number as it has no repeated prime factors. How many days of the year are square free?

EVENTS

1767 “Mason and Dixon ﬁnished drawing the world’s longest straight line.” [366 Dumb Days in History, by Tom Koch]

In 1774, Joseph Priestley, British Presbyterian minister and chemist, identified a gas which he called "dephlogisticated air" -- later known as oxygen. Priestley found that mercury heated in air became coated with "red rust of mercury," which, when heated separately, was converted back to mercury with "air" given off. Studying this "air" given off, he observed that candles burned very brightly in it. Also, a mouse in a sealed vessel with it could breathe it much longer than ordinary air. A strong believer in the phlogiston theory, Priestley considered it to be "air from which the phlogiston had been removed." Further experiments convinced him that ordinary air is one fifth dephlogisticated air, the rest considered by him to be phlogiston. *TIS

1786 Caroline Herschel discovered her first comet, Comet Herschel C/1786 P1 and became history's first woman with this distinction. Her comet came to be known as the "first lady's comet" and brought with it the fame that secured her own place in history books.*The Woman Astronomer

1814 Almost a month after eloping with Georgiana Whitmore; a marriage of which his father did not approve, Charles Babbage writes to his friend John Herschel, who knew nothing of his secret romance, "I am married and have quarreled with my father." Then after a few lines of self-justification, he explains some theorems he has been working on. Herschel was shocked, and responded on the seventh of the same month.*Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer

In 1831, New London Bridge opened to traffic. In 1821, a committee was formed by Parliament to consider the poor condition of the existing centuries-old bridge. The arches had been badly damaged by the Great Freeze, so it was decided to build a new bridge. Building commenced under John Rennie in 1825, and completed in 1831, at the expense of the city. The bridge is composed of five arches, and built of Dartmoor granite. It was opened with great splendour by King William the fourth, accompanied by Queen Adelaide, and many of the members of the royal family, August 1st, 1831. In the 1960's it was auctioned and sold for $2,460,000 to Robert McCulloch who moved it to Havasu City, Arizona. The rebuilt London Bridge was completed and dedicated on 10 Oct 1971.*TIS

1861 First use of "weather forcast". From the BBC I read, "Telling people what had happened was useful, but not as useful as telling them what was going to happen. The man who made the first attempt to bridge that gap, and who coined the phrase "weather forecast", was Admiral Robert Fitzroy. Thirty years before, he had been captain of the Beagle voyage that carried Charles Darwin, so he was no stranger to the perils of weather when at sea. In 1854, Fitzroy was given the job of collecting data on weather at sea, leading what later became the Met Office. After a few years, he saw that weather systems could be tracked. He became convinced that predictions were possible and that storm warnings would save many lives. His bosses did not agree that predictions were realistic, but in spite of them Fitzroy started to issue storm warnings in 1861. Then, on the 1st of August 1861 (exactly 151 years ago), Fitzroy issued the first ever weather forecast for the general public, published in The Times. This earned him a slap on the wrist and a huge amount of criticism, because it was considered that the forecasts could not possibly be accurate. After a lot of debate, the public forecasts ended in 1866." A tweet from @beckyfh Rebekah Higgitt corrected this to : weather predictions existed long before (including, but not only, astrological), bt Aug 1861 *is* 1st use of term "weather forecast"..

1944 The MARK I computer began operation at Harvard. *VFR

1947 The Netherlands issued a postage stamp honoring Jans(Johan) de Witt (1625–1672), who did important early work dealing with analytic geometry. *VFR Besides being a statesman Johan de Witt, also was an accomplished mathematician. In 1659 he wrote "Elementa Curvarum Linearum" as an appendix to his translation of René Descartes' "La Géométrie". In this, De Witt derived the basic properties of quadratic forms, an important step in the field of linear algebra. *Wik

In 1957, the Solar Building (Bridgers and Paxton Office Building), Albuquerque NM, was the first commercial building to be heated by the sun's energy. It was subsequently listed in the National Register of Historic Places for its "exceptional importance," in the area of engineering because it was an early solar-heated commercial building, the equipment for which survived largely intact. It was constructed when active solar-energy systems were still considered experimental. The site is privately owned, at 213 Truman St., NE., Albuquerque, NM. The architectural design was provided by Wright and Stanley.*TIS

1963 Greece issued a postage stamp picturing the “Acropolis at Dawn” by Lord Baden-Powell.*VFR

1967US Navy recalls Hopper to head COBOL effort. The US Navy recalls Captain Grace Murray Hopper to active duty to help develop the programming language COBOL. With a team drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon, Hopper -- who had worked on the Mark I and II computers at Harvard in the 1940s -- created the specifications for COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) with business uses in mind. These early COBOL efforts aimed at creating easily-readable computer programs with as much machine independence as possible. Designers hoped a COBOL program would run on any computer for which a compiler existed with only minimal modifications.
Hopper made many major contributions to computer science throughout her very long career, including what is likely the first compiler ever written, "A-0." She appears to have also been the first to coin the word "bug" in the context of computer science, taping into her logbook a moth which had fallen into a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer. She died on January 1, 1992.
The U.S. Navy commissioned their most advanced ship, the U.S.S. Hopper (DDG 70), on September 6, 1997 named in honor of Grace Hopper. *CMH

1980 Michael Aschbaher wrote Daniel Gorenstein that he had completed the classiﬁcation of the ﬁnite simple groups. This culminated a 20-year eﬀort by some 300 group theorists. The complete proof is about 5000 pages long. [Mathematics Magazine 54 (1981), p. 41

2011 Carolin Crawford selected as the Gresham Professor of Astronomy. *Wik

BIRTHS

1817 Sir (Joseph) Henry Gilbert (1 August 1817 - 23 December 1901) English chemist who as co-director with John Bennet Lawes of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, Hertfordshire, for over 50 years established a premier reputation for research at the first organized agricultural experimental station in the world. Their work applied skills in chemistry, meteorology, botany, animal and vegetable physiology, and geology to determine practical improvements for agricultural methods. They studied the nitrogen requirements of plants, how the element was taken up by plants, and the effects of nitrogen fertilizers on grain production and quality. In the 1840s, they initiated the manufacture of superphosphate fertilizer, one of their inventions.*TIS

1818 Maria Mitchell (August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889) First professional woman astronomer in the United States, born Nantucket, Mass. While pursuing an amateur interest, on 1 Oct 1847, she gained fame from the observation of a comet which she was first to report. She was also the first female member of the American Association of Arts and Scienes. She died at age 70 in Lynn, Mass. *TIS

1861 Ivar Otto Bendixson (August 1, 1861 – 1935) taught at Stockholm, then from 1913 to 1927 he was rector of Stockholm University. He worked on set theory and differential equations. He is best remembered for the Poincaré - Bendixson theorem. *SAU

1881 Otto Toeplitz (1 August 1881, Breslau – 15 February 1940, Jerusalem) born in Breslau, Germany. In 1905 he received his Ph.D. in algebraic geometry at the university there and then moved to G¨ottingen, where he was deeply inﬂuenced by the work of Hilbert. He was also interested in the history of mathematics and held that only a mathematician of stature is qualiﬁed to be a historian of mathematics. In 1949 he published an introduction to the calculus on a historical basis. This delightful book is available in English as The Calculus. A Genetic Approach. *VFR

1905 Helen Battles (Sawyer) Hogg (1 Aug 1905, 28 Jan 1993) was a Canadian astronomer who located, cataloged and measured the distances to variable stars in globular clusters (stars with cyclical changes of brightness found within huge, dense conglomerations of stars located in the outer halo of the Milky Way galaxy). Her interest in astronomy was spurred when she witnessed a total eclipse of the sun in 1925. Alongside her career work, she was also foremost in Canada in popularizing astronomy, about which she wrote a column in the Toronto Star for thirty years. She was the first woman to become president of the Royal Canadian Institute. In 1989, the observatory at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa was dedicated in her name.*TIS

1924 Georges Charpak (1 August 1924 – 29 September 2010) was a French physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992 "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber". This was the last time a single person was awarded the physics prize. *Wik

1937 Barry Edward Johnson (1 Aug 1937 Woolwich, London, England – 5 May 2002 Newcastle upon Tyne, England) is well known for his work on Banach algebras and operator algebras, in particular, studying cohomology in these algebras. His mathematical publications started in 1964 with a series of papers on topological algebras, measure algebras and Banach algebras. In these he examined the theory of centralizers and the continuity of transformations. In 1964 he wrote a joint paper with Ringrose Derivations of operator algebras and discrete group algebras and his next papers continued to examine the continuity of homomorphisms, derivations and linear operators. He developed cancer on February 2000 and fought the disease bravely. Despite his deteriorating physical condition, he continued to undertake cutting edge mathematical research. He died of cancer in St Oswald's Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne aged 64. *SAU

1955 Bernadette Perrin-Riou (August 1, 1955 - ) was awarded the 1999 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in recognition of her number theoretical research on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory.

1970 Elon Lindenstrauss (August 1, 1970 - ) was the first Israeli to be awarded the Fields Medal, for his results on measure rigidity in ergodic theory, and their applications to number theory.
Since 2004, he has been a professor at Princeton University. In 2009, he was appointed to Professor at the Mathematics Institute at the Hebrew University.
Lindenstrauss is the son of the mathematician Joram Lindenstrauss, the namesake of the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma, and computer scientist Naomi Lindenstrauss, both professors at the Hebrew University.
Lindenstrauss was awarded the Erdős Prize and the Fermat Prize in 2009. *Wik

DEATHS

1630 Federico Cesi (13 Mar 1585; 1 Aug 1630 at age 45) Italian scientist who founded the Accademia dei Lincei (1603, Academy of Linceans or Lynxes), often cited as the first modern scientific society, and of which Galileo was the sixth member (1611). Cesi first announced the word telescope for Galileo's instrument. At an early age, while being privately educated, Cesi became interested in natural history and that believed it should be studied directly, not philosophically. The name of the Academy, which he founded at age 18, was taken from Lynceus of Greek mythology, the animal Lynx with sharp sight. He devoted the rest of his life to recording, illustrating and an early classification of nature, especially botany. The Academy was dissolved when its funding by Cesi ceased upon his sudden death(at age 45). *TIS It was revived in its currently well known form of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, by the Vatican, Pope Pius IX in 1847.

1920 Bal Gangadhar Tilak (23 July 1856 – 1 August 1920, age 64), scholar, mathematician, philosopher, and militant nationalist who helped lay the foundation for India's independence. He founded (1914) and served as president of the Indian Home Rule League and, in 1916, concluded the Lucknow Pact with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which provided for Hindu-Muslim unity in the struggle for independence. *TIS

1987 Evelyn Merle Nelson (November 25, 1943 – August 1, 1987), born Evelyn Merle Roden, was a Canadian mathematician. Nelson made contributions to the area of universal algebra with applications to theoretical computer science. Nelson's teaching record was, according to one colleague, "invariably of the highest order". However, before earning a faculty position at McMaster, prejudice against her lead to doubts about her teaching ability. Nelson published over 40 papers during her 20-year career before she died from cancer in 1987.
She, along with Cecilia Krieger, is the namesake of the Krieger–Nelson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Mathematical Society for outstanding research by a female mathematician. *Wik

1992 Leslie Fox (September 1918 Dewsbury, Yorkshire-1 August 1992 Oxford) was a British Mathematician noted for his contribution to numerical analysis.
Fox studied mathematics as a Scholar of Christ Church, Oxford graduating with a First in 1939 and continued to undertake research in the engineering department. While working on his D.Phil. in computational and engineering mathematics under the supervision of Sir Richard Southwell he was also engaged in highly secret war work. He worked on the numerical solution of partial differential equations at a time when numerical linear algebra was performed on a desk calculator. Computational efficiency and accuracy was thus even more important than in the days of electronic computers. Some of this work was published after the end of the Second World War jointly with his supervisor Richard Southwell.
On gaining his doctorate in 1942 Fox joined the Admiralty Computing service. Following the war, in 1945 he went to work in the mathematics division of the National Physical Laboratory. He left the National Physical Laboratory in 1956 and spent a year at the University of California. In 1957 Fox took up an appointment at Oxford University where he set up the Computing Laboratory. In 1963 Fox was appointed as Professor of Numerical Analysis at Oxford and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
Fox's laboratory at Oxford was one of the founding organisations of the Numerical Algorithms Group, and Fox was also a dedicated supporter of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA). The Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis of the IMA is named in his honour.*Wik