Sunday, 4 January 2015

On This Day in Math - January 4

HP 35 calculator

The task is ... not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
~Erwin Schrödinger

The 4th day of the year; it is the smallest composite number. Every positive integer is the sum of at most 4 squares.
Brocard conjectured that there are at least four primes between the squares of any two consecutive primes, with the exception of 2 and 3.
For any number k, real or complex, \( 4 = k^2 - (k+1)^2 - (k+2)^2 + (k+3)^2 \)


EVENTS

1652-3 Seth Ward writes to Oughtred sending measurements of the “recent comet” (Dec of 1652) “Being last week at London I called on Mr. Gratorex, who shewed me a letter which he had received from you concerning the late comet, wherein you desired that he would communicate your observations to such as he should meet with, and desire them to do the like. I took the boldness, therefore, to transcribe that part of your letter which concerned it, and I have here inclosed sent you such observations as were in my absence (for I was then in a journey) made here by Mr. Rooke, and one who belongs to me. “ *De Morgan, Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century.

1754 Kings College, renamed Columbia College in 1784, founded in New York City by royal charter of George II of Great Britain. Now Columbia University, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution.*Wik

1845 The Italian geometer Giusto Bellavitis (1803–1880) was appointed, via a competitive examination, full professor of descriptive geometry at the University of Padua. He held no degrees until the university awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy and mathematics the following year. *VFR

In 1851, The first observation by the Airy transit circle was taken on 4 January 1851, three days later than Airy had intended due to the English weather. Its importance for everyone dates from a conference held in Washington DC in 1884 to create an international time-zone system. It was agreed that the meridian line marked by the cross-hairs in the Airy Transit Circle eyepiece would indicate 0° longitude and the start of the Universal Day.*Royal Observatory Web page
The circle remained in continual use until 1938, and the last ever observation was taken in 1954.the Airy Transit Circle was first used at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. The instrument was designed by George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal. It was set up on the Prime Meridian - the north-south line of longitude 0° - which marks the start of the Universal day for the world. The time at which a star passed over the meridian was measured with a regulator (an extremely accurate clock). The transit was used to measure the angle of a star at that instant. From this data, the co-ordinates of that star could be determined and plotted on a star chart. Navigation at sea depended on the accuracy of these charts, and the Airy Transit Circle was a great improvement on the previous technology.*TIS

In 1912, the closest approach to earth by the moon was 221,441 miles apart center to center..(In 2013 the Moon will make its closest approach to the Earth (at perigee) for the year on Sunday, 23 June, at 11:11 (UTC), and at this time the Moon will be 356,989 km from the Earth. )*Bob Mrotek

1952 While still a movie actor and before he entered politics, Ronald Reagan wrote to a high school student who had asked advice on how to become a sports announcer (one of Reagan’s earlier jobs). In the letter Reagan confessed that he had a weakness in mathematics. [Eves, Return to Mathematical Circles, ◦33.] *VFR

1958 The first artificial earth satellite, the Russian Sputnik(companion) I, fell out of orbit and burned up on re-entering earth's atmosphere.

1972 Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP-35, the first scientific handheld calculator and the final step in ending reliance on slide rules among scientists and students alike. The HP-35 was named for its 35 keys, weighed nine ounces, and sold for $395. One of the tests HP co-founder Dave Packard applied to the device was to throw it across his office and see if it still worked. It did. *CHM

1987 The New York Times reported that an Energy Expo in Seattle unveiled “high-tech, energy-efficient buildings. ... Some of the judges’ favorites include ... an office building with ‘parabolic’ lighting fixtures designed to focus light better than flat systems.” Isn’t it amazing how long it takes technology to catch up with theory? *VFR

In 2004, Spirit, a robot rover landed on Mars to analyze the planet's rocks, looking for evidence of water. It has taken the only photo of Earth from another planet. Surviving dust storms, it far outlasted its expected useful life. A twin robot rover, Opportunity, landed three weeks after Spirit on the other side of the planet.*TIS


BIRTHS
Rubens illustration of projection
1567 François d'Aguilon (also d'Aguillon or in Latin Franciscus Aguilonius) (4 January 1567 – 20 March 1617) was a Belgian Jesuit mathematician, physicist and architect.
D'Aguilon was born in Brussels. He became a Jesuit in 1586. In 1611, he started a special school of mathematics, in Antwerp, which was intended to perpetuate mathematical research and study in among the Jesuits. This school produced geometers like André Tacquet and Jean Charles della Faille.
His book, Opticorum Libri Sex philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles (Six Books of Optics, useful for philosophers and mathematicians alike), published in Antwerp in 1613, was illustrated by famous painter Peter Paul Rubens. It was notable for containing the principles of the stereographic and the orthographic projections, and it inspired the works of Desargues and Christiaan Huygens. *Wik



1643 Sir Isaac Newton was born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Although by the calendar in use at the time of his birth he was born on Christmas Day 1642, we give the date of 4 January 1643 which is the "corrected" Gregorian calendar date bringing it into line with our present calendar. (The Gregorian calendar was not adopted in England until 1752.) *SAU

1797 Wilhelm Beer (4 Jan 1797, 27 Mar 1850 at age 53) German banker and amateur astronomer who owned a fine Fraunhofer refractor which he used in his own a private observatory. He worked jointly with Johann Heinrich von Mädler, to produce the first large-scale moon map to be based on precise micrometric measurements. Their four-year effort was published as Mappa Selenographica (1836). This fine lithographed map provided the most complete details of the Moon's surface in the first half of the 19th century. It was the first lunar map divided in quadrants, and recorded the Moon's face in great detail detail. It was drawn to a scale of scale of just over 38 inches to the moon's diameter. Mädler originated a convention for naming minor craters with Roman letters appended to the name of the nearest large crater (ex. Egede A,B, and C).

1809 Louis Braille (4 Jan 1809; 6 Jan 1852) French educator who developed a tactile form of printing and writing, known as braille, since widely adopted by the blind. He himself knew blindness from the age four, following an accident while playing with an awl. In 1821, while Braille was at a school for the blind, a soldier named Charles Barbier visited and showed a code system he had invented. The system, called "night writing" had been designed for soldiers in war trenches to silently pass instructions using combinations of twelve raised dots. Young Braille realized how useful this system of raised dots could be. He developed a simpler scheme using six dots. In 1827 the first book in braille was published. Now the blind could also write it for themselves using a simple stylus to make the dots.*TIS

1846 Edward Hibberd Johnson (4 Jan 1846; 9 Sep 1917) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. He spent many years in various business projects with Thomas Edison, including being the vice-president of the Edison Electric Light Company. Johnson created the first electric lights on a Christmas tree on 22 Dec 1882.*TIS

1848 Heinrich Suter (4 January 1848, Hedingen near Zurich, Switzerland – 17 March 1922) was a historian of science specializing in Islamic mathematics and astronomy.*Wik

1890 Raymond Woodard Brink (4 Jan 1890 in Newark, New Jersey, USA - 27 Dec 1973 in La Jolla, California, USA) mathematician who studied at Kansas State University, Harvard and Paris. He taught at the University of Minnesota though he spent a year in Edinburgh in 1919. He worked on the convergence of series. He was a President of the Mathematical Association of America.*SAU

1913 Sixto Ríos García (January 4, 1913; Pelahustán, Toledo - July 8, 2008; Madrid,) was a Spanish mathematician, known as the father of Spanish statistics.
He has held the positions of Director of the School of Statistics at the University of Madrid, Director of the Institute for Operations Research and Statistics CSIC, Director, Department of Statistics, Faculty of Mathematical Sciences at the Complutense University and President of the Spanish Society Operational Research, Statistics and Information. It was academic correspondent of the National Academy of Sciences of Buenos Aires, and organizer and founder, commissioned by Unesco, School of Statistics, University of Caracas. He was a member of the drafting committee of Statistical Abstracts and fellow of the International Statistical Institute and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Wik-ES

1940 Brian D. Josephson (4 Jan 1940, ) British physicist who discovered the Josephson effect (1962) - a flow of electric current as electron pairs, called Cooper Pairs, between two superconducting materials that are separated by an extremely thin insulator. This arrangement is called a Josephson Junction. He was a graduate student, 22 years old, at the time. Subsequently, he was awarded a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics (with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever).*TIS



DEATHS

1752 Gabriel Cramer . He is best known for “Cramer’s Rule,” a method for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations using determinants. *VFR Gabriel Cramer (31 July 1704 – 4 January 1752) was a Swiss mathematician, born in Geneva. He showed promise in mathematics from an early age. At 18 he received his doctorate and at 20 he was co-chair of mathematics. In 1728 he proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox that came very close to the concept of expected utility theory given ten years later by Daniel Bernoulli​. He published his best known work in his forties. This was his treatise on algebraic curves, "Introduction à l'analyse des lignes courbes algébriques", published in 1750. It contains the earliest demonstration that a curve of the nth degree is determined by n(n + 3)/2 points on it, in general position. He edited the works of the two elder Bernoullis; and wrote on the physical cause of the spheroidal shape of the planets and the motion of their apsides (1730), and on Newton's treatment of cubic curves (1746). He was professor at Geneva, and died at Bagnols-sur-Cèze.*Wik

1826 Nikolai Fuss (30 Jan 1755 in Basel, Switzerland - 4 Jan 1826 in St Petersburg, Russia) was a Swiss mathematician whose most important contribution was as amanuensis to Euler after he lost his sight. Most of Fuss's papers are solutions to problems posed by Euler on spherical geometry, trigonometry, series, differential geometry and differential equations. His best papers are in spherical trigonometry, a topic he worked on with A J Lexell and F T Schubert. Fuss also worked on geometrical problems of Apollonius and Pappus. He made contributions to differential geometry and won a prize from the French Academy in 1778 for a paper on the motion of comets near some planet Recherche sur le dérangement d'une comète qui passe près d'une planète (see [4]). Fuss won other prizes from Sweden and Denmark. He contributed much in the field of education, writing many fine textbooks. *SAU

1882 John William Draper (May 5, 1811 – January 4, 1882) was an American (English-born) scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with producing the first clear photograph of a female face (1839–40) and the first detailed photograph of the Moon (1840). He was also the first president of the American Chemical Society (1876–77) and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine. One of Draper's books, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, received worldwide recognition and was translated into several languages, but was banned by the Catholic Church. His son, Henry Draper, and his granddaughter, Antonia Maury, were astronomers, and his eldest son, John Christopher Draper, was a chemist. *Wik

1950 Virgil Snyder (9 Nov 1869 in Dixon, Iowa, USA 4 Jan 1950 in Ithaca, New York, USA ) Up until the 1920s, Snyder's prolific output and his talents as a teacher made him, together with Frank Morley of Johns Hopkins, one of the most influential algebraic geometers in the nation. Together with Henry White, in fact, Snyder emerged as a principal heir to Klein's geometric legacy. *SAU

1961 Erwin Schrödinger (12 Aug 1887, 4 Jan 1961) Austrian theoretical physicist who shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with the British physicist P.A.M. Dirac. Schrödinger took de Broglie's concept of atomic particles as having wave-like properties, and modified the earlier Bohr model of the atom to accommodate the wave nature of the electrons. This made a major contribution to the development of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger realized the possible orbits of an electron would be confined to those in which its matter waves close in an exact number of wavelengths. This condition, similar to a standing wave, would account for only certain orbits being possible, and none possible in between them. This provided an explanation for discrete lines in the spectrum of excited atoms.*TIS

1990 Harold E(ugene) Edgerton (6 Apr 1903, 4 Jan 1990) American electrical engineer and ultra-high-speed photographer. As a graduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1926), he used a strobe light in his studies. By 1931, he applied the strobe to ultra-high-speed photography. He formed a company (1947) to specialize in electronic technology, which led to inventing the Rapatronic camera, capable of photographing US nuclear bomb test explosions from a distance of 7 miles. Throughout his career he applied high-speed photography as a tool in various scientific applications. He also developed sonar to study the ocean floor. Using side-scan sonar, in 1973, he helped locate the sunken Civil War battleship USS Monitor, lost since 1862, off Cape Hatteras, NC. *TIS


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 January 2015

On This Day in Math - January 3



Amsler Polarplanimeter



Everyone makes for himself a clear idea of the motion of a point, that is to say, of the motion of a corpuscle which one supposes to be infinitely small, and which one reduces by thought in some way to a mathematical point.
~Louis Poinsot

The 3rd day of the year; 3 is the only prime followed by a square, and every positive integer is the sum of at most 3 triangular numbers. (Can every triangular number >1 be written as the sum of exactly three triangular numbers?)

The smallest Prime Knot has 3 crossings.




EVENTS

1657 Fermat made a challenge to the mathematicians of Europe and England. He posed two problems (in words rather than using notation as we shall do) involving S(n), the sum of the proper divisors of n:
1. Find a cube n such that n + S(n) is a square.
2. Find a square n such that n + S(n) is a cube.
We know that Frenicle found four solutions to the first of these problems on the day that he was given the problem, and found another six solutions the next day. He gave solutions to both problems in Solutio duorm problematum ... (1657).  In this work he posed some problems of his own, including the following:
Find an integer n such that S(n) = 5n, and S(5n) = 25n.
Find an integer n such that S(n) = 7n, and S(7n) = 49n.
Find n such that n3 - (n-1)3 is a cube.
Frenicle solved other problems posed by Fermat. For example he showed that if a right angled triangle has sides integers a, b, c then its area bc/2 can never be a square. He also showed that the area of a right angled triangle is never twice a square. *SAU

1825 In 1824, the Renssalaer School was founded in Troy, N.Y., by Stephen van Renssalaer is the oldest continuously operating engineering college in the U.S. It opened on 3 Jan 1825, with the purpose of instructing persons, who may choose to apply themselves, in the application of science to the common purposes of life." The first class of 10 students graduated on 26 Apr 1826. The first director and senior professor was Amos Eaton who served from Nov 1824 - 10 May 1842. The name of Renssalaer Institute was adopted on 26 Apr 1832, and Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute on 8 Apr 1861.*TIS

1851 In the basement of his Paris home at the corner of rue de Vaugirard and rud d’Assas Foucault first attempts to observe the turning of the earth on its axis with a pendulum. He mounts a 5 Kg bob on a two meter wire, and only observes the wire snap and the bob fall to the floor of the basement. Three days later he would try again, with much better results. *Amir Aczel, Pendulum, pg 5-7 (It seems that as early as 1661, Vincenzo Viviani, a student of Galileo had written, “we observe that all pendulums hanging on a single thread deviate from their initial vertical plane, and always in the same direction.” This document was discovered after Foucault’s results were released in an 1841 manuscript in the library of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.)

In 1919, Professor Ernest Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom. By bombarding nitrogen atoms with alpha particles emitted by radioactive materials he transmuted the nitrogen atoms into oxygen.*TIS ( I could never tell of this without reminding students that the word is drawn from  the Greek atomos ... for"uncut, unhewn; indivisible," *PB

1956 Israel issued the world’s first postage stamp picturing Albert Einstein, the German born American theoretical physicist who invented the theory of Relativity. Naturally his famous equation E = mc2 appears on the stamp. [Scott #117] *VFR

In 1970, a fireball was visible over a large area of the U.S. midwest. The meteorite that fell was the first to be detected by the Prairie Network operated by the Smithsonian Institution's Astrophysical Observatory since 1964. Its path was photographed by two of the system's 16 cameras funded by a NASA grant. Using these records, scientists calculated the meteorite's impact point. Gunther Schwartz, field manager of the network found the 21.6-lb meteorite six days later within a half-mile of the predicted site, near the rural hamlet Lost City, about 45 miles east of Tulsa, OK. The fast retrieval enabled examination of radioactivity produced by the meteorite's exposure to cosmic rays, looking for clues to how the universe was created.*TIS

1970 Yuri Matiyasevich completes proof of Hilbert's 10th Problem.  Having been frustrated  by the problem, he had given up hope of solving it.  Asked to review an article by Julia Robinson, he was inspired by the novelty of her approach and went back to work on H10.  By Jan 3, 1970 he had a proof.  He would present the proof on January 29, 1970

1977 Apple Computer Corporation is incorporated by Stephen Jobs and Stephen Wozniak. Its IPO, which took place three years later, was the largest one since the Ford Motor Ccompany went public in 1956. The stock rose almost 32% that day giving the company a market valuation of $1.778 billion. Seven years later, on January 24, 1984, the company revealed the Macintosh personal computer in a publicity campaign that compared IBM with Big Brother and Apple as the savior of the masses.*CHM

1983 TIME magazine alters its annual tradition of naming a "Man of the Year," choosing instead to name the computer its "Machine of the Year." In introducing the theme, Time publisher John A. Meyers wrote: "Several human candidates might have represented 1982, but none symbolized the past year more richly, or will be viewed by history as more significant, than a machine: the computer." *CHM (This is the date of the issue. The decision had been released earlier, it seems)

1986 Charon officially released as name of Pluto Moon, 7 1/2 years after it was proposed. Charon was originally known by the temporary designation S/1978 P 1, according to the then recently instituted convention. On June 24, 1978, U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer James Christy who had discovered the moon, first suggested the name Charon as a scientific-sounding version of his wife Charlene's nickname, "Char."
Although colleagues at the Naval Observatory proposed Persephone, Christy stuck with Charon after discovering it coincidentally refers to a Greek mythological figure: Charon is the ferryman of the dead, closely associated in myth with the god Hades, whom the Romans identified with their god Pluto. Official adoption of the name by the IAU waited until late 1985 and was announced on January 3, 1986.
There is minor debate over the preferred pronunciation of the name. The practice of following the classical pronunciation established for the mythological ferryman Charon is used by major English-language dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary. These indicate only one pronunciation of "Charon" when referring specifically to Pluto's moon: with an initial "k" sound. Speakers of languages other than English, and many English-speaking astronomers as well, follow this pronunciation.
However, Christy himself pronounced the ch in the moon's name as sh, after his wife Charlene. *Wik



BIRTHS

1777 Louis Poinsot (1777–1859) was a French mathematician and physicist. Poinsot was the inventor of geometrical mechanics, showing how a system of forces acting on a rigid body could be resolved into a single force and a couple. The crater Poinsot on the Moon is named after him. A street in Paris is called Rue Poinsot (14th Arrondissement). When Gustave Eiffel built the famous tower, he included the names of 72 prominent French scientists on plaques around the first stage, Poinsot included. *Wik
He discovered four new regular polyhedra, two of which appear in Kepler's work of 1619 but Poinsot was unaware of this. *SAU and is a discoverer of star polyhedra.*VFR

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

1906 William Wilson Morgan (3 Jan 1906, 21 Jun 1994) American astronomer who, in 1951, provided the first evidence that the Milky Way Galaxy has spiral arms. He spent his entire career at the Yerkes Observatory, including three years as director. Eschewing theory, his research was devoted to morphology, the classification of objects by their form and structure. With Keenan and Kellman, he introduced stellar luminosity classes and the two-dimensional classification of stellar spectra strictly based on the spectra themselves. With Osterbrock and Sharpless he demonstrated the existence of spiral arms in the Galaxy using precise distances of O and B stars obtained from spectral classifications. Morgan invented the UBV system of magnitudes and colors.*TIS

1917 Yurii Alekseevich Mitropolskiy (3 January 1917 — 14 June 2008) was a renowned Soviet, Ukrainian mathematician known for his contributions to the fields of dynamical systems and nonlinear oscillations.*Wik

1921 Jean-Louis Koszul (born January 3, 1921) is a mathematician best known for studying geometry and discovering the Koszul complex. *SAU




DEATHS

1641 Jeremiah Horrocks (born c. 1617, 3 Jan 1641) English astronomer and clergyman who applied Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion to observations of the Moon and Venus. Once Horrocks managed to obtain a small telescope, his observations convinced him that Lansberg's tables were incorrect. He accepted Kepler's elliptical orbits, and in working on the moon he applied an elliptical orbit to it and established that the line of apsides precessed, an effect which he ascribed to the influence of the sun. Horrocks predicted and observed a transit of Venus on 24 Nov 1639, the first one ever observed, and from the observation he corrected the solar parallax, indicating a much greater distance of the sun than anyone before him had admitted. He died at age only 22.*TIS

1858 Henri-Philibert-Gaspard Darcy (10 Jun 1803, 3 Jan 1858) French hydraulic engineer who first derived the equation (now known as Darcy's law) that governs the laminar (nonturbulent) flow of fluids in homogeneous, porous media. In 1856, modern studies of groundwater began when Darcy was commissioned to develop a water-purification system for the city of Dijon, France. He constructed the first experimental apparatus to study the flow characteristics of water through the earth. From his experiments, he derived the Darcy's Law equation, describing the flow of water in nature, which is fundamental to understanding groundwater systems. He performed extensive tests on filtration and pipe resistance. He initiated the open-channel studies carried out by Bazin.*TIS

1891 John Casey (12 May 1820 in Coolattin, Kilbehenny, Co. Limerick, Ireland - 3 Jan 1891 in Dublin, IrelandCasey wrote over 25 research papers but his mathematical reputation rests on the six textbooks he wrote: A sequel to the first six books of the Elements of Euclid (1881; 8th ed. 1910); A treatise on the analytical geometry of the point, line, circle and conic sections (1885; 2nd ed. 1893); A treatise on elementary trigonometry (1886); A treatise on plane trigonometry (1888); A treatise on spherical trigonometry (1889). He also published his own edition of The first six books of the Elements of Euclid (1882; 17th ed. 1902) which is remarkable for its large store of exercises, collected and devised by himself and Richard Townsend, which occasioned the publication of a separate Key to the exercises of Casey's Elements of Euclid (1885) by Casey's son, Joseph. It was in his Sequel to Euclid that Casey presented for the first time in a textbook those extensions of the theorems of Euclid that became known as the newer geometry of the triangle; indeed, he and the French mathematician Émile Lemoine (1840-1912) are held to be the founders of the so-called Modern Geometry of the circle and triangle. Casey's work was much appreciated in Belgium and France, and Professor Joseph Neuberg of Liège made substantial additions to later editions of Sequel to Euclid.*SAU

1892 Heinrich Eduard Schroeter (January 8th 1829 in Königsberg , January 3 1892 in Breslau ) was a German mathematician , who worked in synthetic geometry in the tradition of Jacob Steiner. *Wik

1908 Charles Augustus Young (15 Dec 1834, 3 Jan 1908) American astronomer who made the first observations of the flash spectrum of the Sun, proved the gaseous nature of the sun's corona and discovered the reversing layer of the solar atmosphere. He was a pioneer in the study of the spectrum of the sun and experimented in photographing solar prominences in full sunlight. On 22 Dec 1870, at the eclipse in Spain, he saw the lines of the solar spectrum all become bright for perhaps a second and a half (the "flash spectrum") and announced the "reversing layer." By exploring from the high altitude of Sherman, Wy. (1872), he more than doubled the number of bright lines he had observed in the chromosphere, By a comparison of observations, he concluded that magnetic conditions on the earth respond to solar disturbances.*TIS

1912 Jacob Amsler (16 Nov 1823 in Stalden bei Brugg, Switzerland - 3 Jan 1912 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland)worked on a problem which had quite a famous history. That was the problem of the attraction of an ellipsoid, which was first studied in depth by Ivory whose solution was later generalised by Poisson. Amsler extended the theorems of both Ivory and Poisson on this topic. It was a promising start to his research career in mathematical physics.
In 1854 Amsler married and this may have been the turning point in his career. His wife, Elsie Laffon, was the daughter of a well known Swiss scientist and, as was the custom in Switzerland at that time, he was known as Amsler-Laffon from this time on. Elsie and Jacob Amsler-Laffon's children were, however, always known by the name Amsler rather than Amsler-Laffon.
Shortly after his marriage Amsler changed his research interests and his career. He began to study the construction of precision mathematical instruments and quite quickly he had an idea for the design of a new type of planimeter. He invented the polar planimeter, a device for measuring areas enclosed by plane curves. It was based on polar coordinates whereas earlier instruments were based on cartesian coordinates. In 1856 Amsler published a paper Über das Planimeter in which he gave details of his idea. As Mahoney writes in , Amsler's planimeter, "... adapted easily to the determination of static and inertial moments and to the coefficients of Fourier series: it proved especially useful to shipbuilders and railway engineers. "
In order to make money from his invention, Amsler set up a workshop in Schaffhausen in 1854 specially designed to produce his polar planimeter. Three years later he had given up al his other interests to concentrate fully on producing instruments in the workshop. His shop produced 50 000 such instruments during his lifetime.
Amsler did not rest his fame on this single inspired idea but continued to invent new precision instruments. None of his other inventions came close to the polar planimeter in importance, but they were of sufficient quality to win him prizes at the world exhibition at Vienna in 1873, at Paris in 1881, and again in Paris in 1889. His brilliance was recognised with election to the Paris Académie des Sciences in 1892. *SAU

1920 Zygmunt Janiszewski, the father of Polish mathematics, died. At the end of World War I, Janiszewski was the driving force behind the creation of one of the strongest schools of mathematics in the world. This is all the more remarkable, given Poland's difficult situaltion at war's end.
Janiszewski devoted the family property that he had inherited from his father to charity and education. He also donated all the prize money that he received from mathematical awards and competitions to the education and development of young Polish students.
In mathematics, his main interest was topology.
He was the driving force, together with Wacław Sierpiński and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, behind the founding of the mathematics journal Fundamenta Mathematicae. Janiszewski proposed the name of the journal in 1919, though the first issue was published in 1920, after his death. It was his intent that the first issue comprise solely contributions by Polish mathematicians. It was Janiszewski's vision that Poland become a world leader in the field of mathematics—which she did in the interbellum.
His life was cut short by the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which took his life at Lwów on 3 January 1920 at the age of 31. He willed his body for medical research, and his cranium for craniological study, desiring to be "useful after his death". *Wik

1927 Carl David Tolmé Runge (30 Aug 1856 in Bremen, Germany - 3 Jan 1927 in Göttingen, Germany) worked on a procedure for the numerical solution of algebraic equations and later studied the wavelengths of the spectral lines of elements. *SAU In numerical analysis, the Runge–Kutta methods that are named for him are an important family of implicit and explicit iterative methods for the approximation of solutions of ordinary differential equations. These techniques were developed around 1900 Runge and M.W. Kutta.*Wik When your regular walking partners include Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski, you can't count on easily impressing them with your mental math skills, but it seems that Runge did so frequently. Once on their regular walks Klein brought up some departmental event that required them to know what date Easter would occur the next year. The group immediately turned to the idea of where they might acquire a calendar for the following year along the walk; all that is, except Runge who fell silent for a few yards, and then announced the date.

1967 Reginald Crundall Punnett (20 Jun 1875, 3 Jan 1967) English Mendelian geneticist who, with the English biologist William Bateson, were among the first English geneticists. They reported the discovery of two new genetic principles: the first account of genetic linkage in sweet pea; and gene interaction (1905). Punnett devised the "Punnett" square to depict the number and variety of genetic combinations. Punnett had a role in connecting Mendelism with statistics. In 1908, Punnett was asked at a lecture to explain, " if brown eyes were dominant, then why wasn't the whole country becoming brown-eyed?" Punnett in turn asked his friend the mathematician, G. H. Hardy. Out of this conversation came the Hardy-Weinberg Law which calculates how population affects genetic inheritance.*TIS

1989 Sergei Lvovich Sobolev (Russian: Серге́й Льво́вич Со́болев; 6 October 1908 – 3 January 1989) was a Soviet mathematician working in mathematical analysis and partial differential equations. He was born in St. Petersburg, and died in Moscow.*Wik

2011 Anatoliy Volodymyrovych Skorokhod (September 10, 1930 – January 3, 2011) was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician, and an academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine from 1985 to his death.
In 1956–1964 he worked at Kyiv University. From 1964 until 2002, he was at the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. At the same time, he was a professor at Kyiv University. Since 1993, he had been a professor at Michigan State University, U.S., and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His scientific works are on the theory of stochastic differential equations, limit theorems of random processes, distributions in infinite-dimensional spaces, statistics of random processes and Markov processes.
Skorokhod is the author of more than 450 scientific works, including more than 40 monographs and books. *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

Friday, 2 January 2015

On This Day in Math - January 2





Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.
~Isaac Asimov

The 2nd day of the year; the smallest prime, and the only even prime. Euler's beautiful theorem for polyhedra shows that , the number of vertices plus the number of faces minus the number of edges will equal two. The sum of the reciprocals of the triangular numbers is 2, 2 = 1/1 + 1/3 + 1/6 + 1/10 + ...

And perhaps the most beautiful way to define perfect numbers: Let n be a perfect number. Then the reciprocals of n's divisors sum to 2 *Algebra Fact ‏@AlgebraFact

The number of different ways of expressing an integer n as the sum of two squares is, on average, equal to pi.


EVENTS

1663 The Republic of Venice offered Stefano DegliAngeli (1623–1697) the professorship of mathematics at the University of Padua, a post that Galileo held earlier. He was a student of Cavalieri who generalized the Archimedian spiral.*VFR

1665 Samuel Pepys sees a copy of Hooke’s Micrographia at his bookseller and orders a copy. “Thence to my bookseller's and at his binder's saw Hooke's book of the Microscope, which is so pretty that I presently bespoke it.” *Pepy’s Diary

1690 The Hamburg Mathematical Society was founded. It is the oldest mathematical society now in existence. The second oldest is the Amsterdam Mathematical Society founded in 1788.  The Hamburg Mathematical Society was founded by school-master Henry Meissner and Master Reckoner Valentin Heins. *R C  Archibald, Scripta Mathematica 1932 (With *Wik assistance from @rmathematicus and @MathBooks)

1697 In his New Year’s greetings to Duke Rudolph August, Leibniz sent a “thought-penny or medal” showing his invention of the binary system. Leibniz argued that just as all numbers can be created from the symbols 0 and 1, so God created all things. [The Monist 26 (1916), p 561]. *VFR

1738/9 At age 23, John Winthrop, former pupil of Isaac Greenwood, succeeded him as the second Hollis Professor at Harvard. [I. B. Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science, p. 36] 1822 Rudolf Clausius born. He established the foundations of modern thermodynamics. *VFR

1769 Originally called the Philosophical Society, on January 2, 1769, it united with the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge under the name "American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge". the Society was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram as an offshoot of an earlier club, the Junto.
Since its inception, the Society attracted America's finest minds. Early members included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James McHenry, Thomas Paine, David Rittenhouse, Nicholas Biddle, Owen Biddle, Benjamin Rush, James Madison, Michael Hillegas, John Marshall, and John Andrews. The Society also recruited philosophers from other countries as members, including Alexander von Humboldt, the Marquis de Lafayette, Baron von Steuben, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Princess Dashkova.
By 1746 the Society had lapsed into inactivity. In 1767, however, it was revived, in 1769, it united with the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge Benjamin Franklin was elected the first president. During this time, the society maintained a standing Committee on American Improvements; one of its investigations was to study the prospects of a canal to connect the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River. The canal, which had been proposed by Thomas Gilpin, Sr., would not become reality until the 1820s *Wik

In 1839, French pioneering photographer Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the moon. *TIS

1879 West Point cadet J. W. Acton wrote in his copy of Charles Davies’ Algebra (1877 edition) that he had been examined on logarithms and “fessed cold,” which was cadet slang for flunking. Then he added this ditty:
This study was ordained in hell
to torment those who on earth dwell
And it suits its purpose well
Glory Hallelujah!! Amen! Amen! Amen!
Apparently Acton never mastered logarithms for he did not graduate from USMA. *VFR

1890 President Benjamin Harrison received, from the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, an exact duplicate of the standard kilogram; it is housed at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C

1936  In a letter From R. A. Fisher to E.B.Ford, he writes, “had the shocking experience lately of coming to the conclusion that the data given in Mendel’s paper must be practically all faked.” *R A Fisher Digital Archive, University College London

1947 Matt Weinstock’s column in the Los Angeles Daily News began: “Readers of Esquire magazine [January 1948] ... are slowly losing their minds over a story by Martin Gardner” entitled the “No-Sided Professor.” This story is the first time that the Mobius strip, a one-sided surface, was used in a piece of fantasy. The story is reprinted in Gardner’s The No-Sided Professor (1987), pp 45–58.*VFR

In 1960, John H Reynolds, (American physicist and a specialist in mass spectrometry), set the age of solar system at 4,950,000,000 years.*TIS

1975 Gates and Allen name "Micro-Soft. Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a letter to MITS, the Albuquerque, N.M., company that manufactured the Altair computer, offering a version of BASIC for MITS's "Altair 8800" computer. The contract for BASIC reflected the first time Gates and Allen referred to themselves as the company Microsoft, spelled in the document as "Micro-Soft." *CHM

1979 Software Arts incorporated. They designed and programmed VisiCalc, the best-selling micro-computer program ever made. *VFR  VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool. VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies in six years. *Wik



BIRTHS

1729 Johann Daniel Titius (2 Jan 1729; 11 Dec 1796) Prussian astronomer, physicist, and biologist whose formula (1766) expressing the distances between the planets and the Sun was confirmed by J.E. Bode in 1772, when it was called Bode's Law. Titius suggested that the mean distances of the planets from the sun very nearly fit a simple relationship of A=4+(3x2n) giving the series 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, *, 52, 100, corresponding to the relative distance of the six known planets, up to Saturn, and an unassigned value (*) between Mars and Jupiter. Olbers searched for a planetary object at this empty position, thus discovering the asteroid belt. However, since the discovery of Neptune, which did not fit the pattern, the "law" is regarded as a coincidence with no scientific significance.*TIS

1822 Rudolf (Julius Emanuel) Clausius (2 Jan 1822; 24 Aug 1888)  was a German mathematical physicist who was one of the founders of thermodynamics. In 1850, he stated the second law of thermodynamics. As a theoretical physicist, he also researched in molecular physics and electricty. In his published work in thermodynamics (1865) he gave the First and Second laws of thermodynamics in the following form: (1) The energy of the universe is constant. (2) The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. In all Clausius wrote eight important papers on the topic. He restated Sadi Carnot's principle of the efficiency of heat engines. The Clausius-Clapeyron equation expresses the relation between the pressure and temperature at which two phases of a substance are in equilibrium. *TIS

1905 Lev Genrikhovich Schnirelmann (January 2, 1905 in Gomel – September 24, 1938 in Moscow) was a Soviet mathematician who sought to prove Goldbach's conjecture. In 1931, using the Brun sieve, he proved that any natural number greater than 1 can be written as the sum of not more than 20 prime numbers.
His other fundamental work is joint with Lazar Lyusternik. Together, they developed the Lyusternik-Schnirelmann category, as it is called now, based on the previous work by Henri Poincaré, David Birkhoff, and Marston Morse. The theory gives a global invariant of spaces, and has led to advances in differential geometry and topology. According to Pontryagin's memoir, Schnirelmann committed suicide in Moscow. *Wik

1920 Isaac Asimov (2 Jan 1920; 6 Apr 1992) American author and biochemist, who was a prolific writer of science fiction and of science books for the layperson. Born in Petrovichi, Russia, he emigrated with his family to New York City at age three. He entered Columbia University at the age of 15 and at 18 sold his first story to Amazing Stories. After earning a Ph.D., he taught biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine after 1949. By 18 Mar 1941, Asimov had already written 31 stories, sold 17, and 14 had been published. As an author, lecturer, and broadcaster of astonishing range, he is most admired as a popularizer of science (The Collapsing Universe; 1977) and a science fiction writer (I, Robot;1950). He coined the term "robotics." He published about 500 volumes.*TIS

1923 Philip J. Davis (January 2, 1923; ) is an American academic applied mathematician and writer.
He is known for his work in numerical analysis and approximation theory, as well as his investigations in the history and philosophy of mathematics. Currently a Professor Emeritus from the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, he earned his degrees in mathematics from Harvard University
He was awarded the Chauvenet Prize for mathematical writing in 1963 for an article on the gamma function, and has won numerous other prizes, including being chosen to deliver the 1991 Hendrick Lectures of the MAA . In addition, he has authored several books. Among the best known are The Mathematical Experience (with Reuben Hersh), a popular survey of modern mathematics and its history and philosophy; Methods of Numerical Integration (with Philip Rabinowitz), long the standard work on the subject of quadrature; and Interpolation and Approximation, still an important reference in this area. *Wik

1938 Anatoly Mykhailovych Samoilenko (2 Jan 1938 in Potiivka, Radomyshl, Zhytomyr oblast, Ukraine,  ) is a Ukrainian mathematician who worked on linear and nonlinear ordinary differential equations. *SAU

1940 Sathamangalam Ranga Iyengar Srinivasa Varadhan (2 January 1940, ) FRS is an Indian-American mathematician from Madras (Chennai), Tamil Nadu, India. Varadhan is currently a professor at the Courant Institute. He is known for his work with Daniel W. Stroock on diffusion processes. He was awarded the Abel Prize in 2007 for his work on large deviations with Monroe D. Donsker *Wik

1941 Donald B. Keck (2 Jan 1941 in Lansing, Michigan, ) American research  physicist, who with his colleagues at Corning Glass, Dr. Robert Maurer and Dr. Peter Schultz, invented fused silica optical waveguide - optical fiber. This was a breakthrough creating a revolution in telecommunications, capable of carrying 65,000 times more information than conventional copper wire. In 1970, Maurer, Keck, and Schultz solved a problem that had previously stumped scientists around the world. They designed and produced the first optical fiber with optical losses low enough for wide use in telecommunications. The light loss was limited to 20 decibels per kilometer (at least one percent of the light entering a fiber remains after traveling one kilometer).*TIS



DEATHS

1892 Sir George Biddell Airy (27 Jul 1801, 2 Jan 1892) English astronomer who became the seventh Astronomer Royal (1836-92). In his life he studied interference fringes in optics, made a mathematical study of the rainbow and computed the density of the Earth by swinging a pendulum at the top and bottom of a deep mine, determined the mass of the planet Jupiter and its period rotation, calculated the orbits of comets and cataloged stars. He designed corrective lenses for astigmatism (1825), the first that worked. His motivation was his own astigmatism. Airy had a long-standing battle with Babbage. In 1854, the conflict continued between the two during the battle of the  incompatible railway gauges in England. Airy championed the railway narrow gauge and Babbage for the wide gauge. *TIS

1913 Léon (-Philippe) Teisserenc de Bort (5 Nov 1855, 2 Jan 1913) French meteorologist who discovered the stratosphere (1902). He established own observatory at Trappes (1896) and pioneered in the use of unmanned, instrumented balloons to investigate atmosphere. Teisserenc de Bort found that above an altitude of 7 miles (11 km) temperature ceased to fall and sometimes increased slightly. He named this upper part of the atmosphere the stratosphere, because he thought that the different gases would lie in distinct strata as, without temperature differentials, there would be no mechanism to disturb them. The lower part of the atmosphere he named the troposphere (Greek: "sphere of change") as here, with abundant temperature differentials, constant change and mingling of atmospheric gases occurred. *TIS

1972 Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth (née Moller)(24 May 1878, 2 Jan 1972)  American efficiency expert, who as wife of Frank Bunker Gilbreth, contracting engineer, together developed the method of time-and-motion study. Upon her marriage, 19 Oct 1904, she became a partner in her husband's fledgling motion study business. As a contractor, he was already applying ideas to improve the speed of building. After a few years, they applied motion study to industry. Each step of work activity was to be studied in detail (employing motion pictures for analysis) to determine the optimal way to execute a given task. By choosing a method of least exertion, the employees would be more healthy, more productive, and economically improve the business. She continued after her husband's death in 1924. *TIS

1992 Brian Kuttner (11 April 1908 in London, England - 2 Jan 1992 in Birmingham, England) Most of Kuttner's early work is on Fourier series and summability. Hardy quotes some of these early results of Kuttner's in his treatise Divergent series (1949). Throughout his career he continued to publish a steady stream of high quality research papers right up to the time of his death. There was no signs that his output was decreasing when he retired, rather the reverse since the publication of 8 papers in 1978 indicates that his research activity increased after he retired from the Birmingham chair in 1975. Mathematical Reviews lists over 120 of his papers, and the continuation of joint papers appearing after his death show clearly that even into his 80s his love for his favourite topics of analysis remained as strong as ever. *SAU


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

Thursday, 1 January 2015

On This Day in Math - January 1




The unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in science is a gift we neither understand nor deserve.
~Eugene Paul Wigner

The first day of the year 2015;   2013, 2014, and 2015 are each a product of three prime numbers.
2015 is 11111011111 a binary palindrome.  In base four it is 113113, in base eight it is 3737 and in base twelve it is 11bb. 
And 2015, 2015 raised to the power of 137 is a big number whose digit sum is 2015. *Futility Closet, w/ hat tip to David Brooks
The equation (69-4) x (38-7) = 2015 uses every digit only once. *Alex Bellos ‏@alexbellos

EVENTS


4713 B.C. This was Julian day 1 and began at noon Greenwich or Universal Time (U.T.). It provides a convenient way to keep track of the number of days between events. Noon, January 1, 2014, begins Julian Day Number(JDN) 2,457,024 For the use of the Chinese remainder theorem in determining this date, see American Journal of Physics, 49(1981), 658–661.
JDN 2,400,000 was November 16, 1858. JD 2,500,000.0 will occur on August 31, 2132 at noon UT. *VFR

1675 Edmund Halley, along with Robert Hooke, Thomas Streete and Jonas Moore observe a lunar eclipse from Tower of London using Hooke's balance spring watch to time the event. *Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, pg 158

1800 Cauchy’s father was elected Secretary of the Senate in France. The young Cauchy used a corner of his father’s office in Luxembourg Palace for his own desk. LaGrange and Laplace frequently stopped in on business and so took an interest in the boys mathematical talent. One day, in the presence of numerous dignitaries, Lagrange pointed to the young Cauchy and said “You see that little young man? Well! He will supplant all of us in so far as we are mathematicians.”
[E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics, p. 274] *VFR

1801 Giuseppe Piazzi (1746–1826) discovered the first asteroid, Ceres, but lost it in the sun 41 days later, after only a few observations. Using his new technique of least squares, Gauss correctly predicted where it could be found. This made Gauss a celebrity. [DSB 5, 300 and 10, 591–592;
Buhler, Gauss, pp. 40–45] *VFR
It was originally considered to be a new planet This was followed by the discovery of other similar bodies, which with the equipment of the time appeared to be points of light, like stars, showing little or no planetary disc, though readily distinguishable from stars due to their apparent motions. This prompted the astronomer Sir William Herschel to propose the term "asteroid", from Greek αστεροειδής, asteroeidēs 'star-like, star-shaped', from ancient Greek αστήρ, astēr 'star, planet'. *Wik

1806 France adopts the Gregorian calendar for the second time. France had used the Gregorian calendar prior to Oct 5, 1783 when the French revolutionaries, in their anticlerical zeal, adopted the “calendar of reason.” The year had twelve months, each with three weeks of ten days, plus five or six epagomenal days (days within a solar calendar that are outside any regular month). The day was divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes each. *VFR

1840 The metric system became the only legal system in France on 1 Jan 1840. Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona, completing their work in 1799 and leading to the formal definition of the metre on 10 Dec 1799. In 1812, it was decreed that a hybrid 'systeme usuelle' could be used. *VFR

In 1872, the metric system was officially introduced throughout the German Empire. (Since 1795, the metric system had been the standard in France. A committeee from the French Academy used a decimal system and defined the meter to be one 10-millionths of the distance from the equator to the Earth's Pole. For the metric unit of mass, the gram was defined as the mass of one cubic centimeter of pure water at a given temperature.) By act Congress, the use of the metric system was legalized in the U.S. (1866), but was not made obligatory. On 20 May 1875, the Treaty of the Meter was signed by twenty countries, including the United States, at the International Metric Convention. *TIS

1876 The British Trade Marks Registration Act was passed which allowed formal registration of trade marks at the UK Patent Office for the first time. Registration of marks began on 1 January 1876. The first trade mark to be so registered was the red triangle of the Bass Brewery. *Wik



1896, German scientist, Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery of x-rays. He sent copies of his manuscript and some of his x-ray photographs to several renowned physicists and friends, including Lord Kelvin in Glasgow and Henre Poincare in Paris. Four days later, on 5 Jan 1896, Die Presse published the news in a front-page article which described the discovery and suggested new methods of medical diagnoses might be made with this new kind of radiation. One day later, the London Standard cabled the news to other countries around the world about "a light which for the purpose of photography will penetrate wood, flesh, cloth, and most other organic substances." It printed the first English-language account the next day. *TIS

(sometime in the 1920's) The British Mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote a postcard to a friend listing the following six New Year's Wishes:
(1) Prove the Riemann hypothesis.
(2) make 211 not out in the fourth innings of the last test match at the Oval.
(3) find an argument for the nonexistence of God which shall convince the general public.
(4) be the first man to the top of Mt. Everst.
(5) be proclaimed the first president of the U.S.S.R. of Great Britain and Germany.
(6) murder Mussolini.

It seems that, like most New Year's Resolutions, they went unfulfilled.
*Clifford A. Pickover, A Passion for Mathematics, pg 23

1925 Hubble Paper changes the size of the universe: Hubble's observations, made in 1922–1923, proved conclusively that these nebulae were much too distant to be part of the Milky Way and were, in fact, entire galaxies outside our own. This idea had been opposed by many in the astronomy establishment of the time, in particular by the Harvard University-based Harlow Shapley. (Shapley wrote sarcastically that Hubble's letter informing him of his results was “the most entertaining piece of literature I have seen for a long time.” ) Despite the opposition, Hubble, then a thirty-five year old scientist, had his findings first published in The New York Times on November 23, 1924, and then more formally presented in the form of a paper at the January 1, 1925 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Hubble's findings fundamentally changed the scientific view of the universe.*Wik




1938 Hungary issued a stamp portraying Pope Sylvester II, Archbishop of Astrik.(Often known in mathematics as Gerbert of Aurillac) [Scott #511] *VFR

1945 Counterfeit coins must have been around as long as coins, but the first written example of a counterfeit coin problem was printed in the American Mathematical Monthly in the January issue of 1945. The problem was submitted by E. D. Schell and asked, "You have eight similar coins and a beam balance. At most one coin is counterfeit and hence underweight. How can you detect whether there is an underweight coin, and if so, which one, using the balance only twice." *Counterfeit Coin Problems, Bennet Manvel, Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Mar., 1977), pp. 90-92

In 1946, ENIAC, the first U.S. computer was finished by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It was built at the Moore School of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, based on ideas developed by John Atanasoff of Iowa State College. Though not the first ever computer, ENIAC is regarded as the first successful, general digital computer. It weighed over 27,000 kg (60,000 lb), and contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. A staff of six technicians replaced about 2000 of the tubes each month. Many of ENIAC's first tasks were for military purposes, such as calculating ballistic firing tables and designing atomic weapons. Since ENIAC was initially not a stored program machine, it had to be reprogrammed for each task. *TIS

1962 The standard meter is re-defined as “the length of 1,656,763.83 wave lengths of a certain type of orange colored radiation given off in a vacuum by the atom of krypton 86.” *Gardner, Relativity for the Million, pg 5

In 1972, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) was adopted worldwide. UTC is determined from six primary atomic clocks that are coordinated by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures located in France. The abbreviation - UTC - was chosen as an international compromise between the initials of the English language form "coordinated universal time" and the French "temps universel coordonné." Time zone boundaries as used by nations are drawn according to political considerations. Leap seconds are added to UTC periodically, about once each 18 months, so the highly accurate atomic clock time matches the time measured by Earth's rotation, which is very slightly variable due to tidal forces with the Moon.*TIS

In 2000, Greenwich Electronic Time - known as GeT - was initiated in Britain to act as an international standard for all electronic commerce. All e-mail messages and e-commerce transactions already carry a "time stamp" based on Co-ordinated Universal Time - the modern equivalent of GMT. Most computer clocks have software which converts e-mail and message dates into local time. The move will provide a single time standard for worldwide Internet traders and users around the world in the same way that Greenwich Mean Time has helped travellers to keep time since 1884.*TIS




BIRTHS

1614 John Wilkins FRS (1 January 1614 – 19 November 1672) was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, as well as a founder of the Invisible College and one of the founders of the Royal Society, and Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death.
Wilkins is one of the few persons to have headed a college at both the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. He was a polymath, although not one of the most important scientific innovators of the period. His personal qualities were brought out, and obvious to his contemporaries, in reducing political tension in Interregnum Oxford, in founding the Royal Society on non-partisan lines, and in efforts to reach out to religious nonconformists. He was one of the founders of the new natural theology compatible with the science of the time.
He is particularly known for An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language in which, amongst other things, he proposed a universal language and a decimal system of measure not unlike the modern metric system.*wik

1803 Count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja (1 Jan 1803, 28 Sept 1869) Libri's early work was on mathematical physics, particularly the theory of heat. However he made many contributions to number theory and to the theory of equations. His best work during the 1830s and 1840s was undoubtedly his work on the history of mathematics. From 1838 to 1841 he published four volumes of Histoire des sciences mathématiques en Italie, depuis la rénaissanace des lettres jusqu'à la fin du dix-septième siècle. He intended to write a further two volumes, but never finished the task. It is an important work but suffers from over-praise of Italians at the expense of others. *SAU

1806 Horatio Nelson Robinson, (Jan 1, 1806; Hartwick, Otsego County, New York - 19 Jan, 1867; Elbridge, New York) received only a common-school education, but early evinced a genius for mathematics, making the calculations for an almanac at the age of sixteen. A wealthy neighbor gave him the means to study at Princeton, and at the age of nineteen he was appointed an instructor of mathematics in the navy, which post he retained for ten years. He then taught an academy at Canandaigua, and afterward one at Genesee, New York, until in 1844 he gave up teaching because his health was impaired, and removed to Cincinnati, Ohio. There he prepared the first of a series of elementary mathematical text-books, which have been adopted in many of the academies and colleges of the United States. In revising and completing the series he had the assistance of other mathematicians and educators. He removed to Syracuse, New York, in 1850, and to Elbridge in 1854. His publications include "University Algebra" (Cincinnati, 1847), with a "Key" (1847) ; "Astronomy, University Edition" (1849) ; " Geometry and Trigonometry" (1850) ; "Treatise on Astronomy" (Albany, 1850) ; "Mathematical Recreations" (Albany, 1851); "Concise Mathematical Operations" (Cincinnati, 1854); "Treatise on Surveying and Navigation" (1857), which, in its revised form, was edited by Oren Root (New York, 1863); "Analytical Geometry and Conic Sections" (New York, 1864) ; "Differential and Integral Calculus" (1861), edited by Isaac F. Quinby (l868). *famousamericans.net

1878 Agner Krarup Erlang (January 1, 1878 – February 3, 1929) was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory.*Wik

1879  Albert Hoyt Taylor (1 Jan 1879; 11 Dec 1961) American physicist and radio engineer, known as the "father of navy radar" whose work laid the foundation for U.S. radar development. In Sep 1922, with Leo C. Young, he proposed the detection of intruding ships by transmitting a curtain of high-frequency radio waves across harbour entrances, or between ships, with a receiver to detect disturbances caused by ships moving in the electromagnetic field. Taylor became superintendent of the Radio Division at the newly-established Naval Research Laboratory (1923-45). In 1934, he directed Robert Page to experiment with pulsed high-frequency radio signals for aircraft detection. In 1937, the first 200-MHz shipboard radar was installed. He also investigated ionospheric effects. *TIS

1894 Satyendra Nath Bose (1 Jan 1894; 4 Feb 1974) Indian physicist and mathematician who collaborated with Albert Einstein to develop a theory of statistical quantum mechanics, now called Bose-Einstein statistics. In his early work in quantum theory (1924), Bose wrote about the Planck black-body radiation law using a quantum statistics of photons, Plank's Law and the Light Quantum Hypothesis. Bose sent his ideas to Einstein, who extended this technique to integral spin particles. Dirac coined the name boson for particles obeying these statistics. Among other things, Bose-Einstein statistics explain how an electric current can flow in superconductors forever, with no loss. Bose also worked on X-ray diffraction, electrical properties of the ionosphere and thermoluminescence. *TIS

1905 Stanisław Mazur (1 January 1905, Lviv - 5 November 1981, Warsaw) was a Polish mathematician and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He made important contributions to geometrical methods in linear and nonlinear functional analysis and to the study of Banach algebras. Mazur was also interested in summability theory, infinite games and computable functions.
Mazur was a student of Stefan Banach at University of Lwów. His doctorate, under Banach's supervision, was awarded in 1935.
Mazur was a close collaborator with Banach at Lwów and was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics, where he participated in the mathematical activities at the Scottish Café. On 6 November 1936, Mazur posed the "basis problem" of determining whether every Banach space has a Schauder basis, with Mazur promising a "live goose" as a reward: Thirty-seven years later, a live goose was awarded by Mazur to Per Enflo in a ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland.*Wik

1917  Jule Gregory Charney (1 Jan 1917; 16 Jun 1981) American meteorologist who, working with John von Neumann, first introduced the electronic computer into weather prediction (1950) and improved understanding of the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere. The entire Oct 1947 issue of the Journal of Meteorology published his Ph.D. dissertation, (UCLA, 1936) Dynamics of long waves in a baroclinic westerly current. It emphasized the influence of "long waves" in the upper atmosphere rather than the existing practice of emphasis on the polar front. It also simplified analysis of perturbations of these waves using mathematically rigorous methods that yielded useful physical interpretation. He helped the U.S. Weather Bureau set up (1954) a numerical weather prediction unit. *TIS

1920  Heinz Zemanek, one of the European pioneers in computer technology, is born in Vienna, Austria. He studied at the University of Technology Vienna and received a doctorate degree in 1951. During 1954 - 1959 Zemanek gathered a group of students to develop the Mailuefterl, one of the earliest fully transistorized computers in Europe. From 1961 to 1975 Zemanek was Director of the IBM Laboratory Vienna which was established for his team. During this period Zemanek designed the PL/I programming language. The formal definition was written in the Vienna Definition Language, which was later extended to the Vienna Definition Method. (VDL and VDM). From 1968 to 1971 he founded the Austrian Computer Society and was President of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). In 1976 Professor Zemanek was appointed IBM Fellow.*CHM

1923 Daniel E. Gorenstein (January 1, 1923 – August 26, 1992) was an American mathematician. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1950 under Oscar Zariski, introducing in his dissertation Gorenstein rings. He worked on commutative algebra, and then was a major influence on the classification of finite simple groups.*wik

1942 Edward Joseph Hoffman (1 Jan 1942; 1 Jul 2004) American biomedical physicist who achieved international recognition in the science field of medical imaging. In 1974, working with Michael E Phelps and others, he co-invented the PET Scanner (Positron Emission Tomography) which is used to detect cancers and other diseases. Hoffman further developed its use for quantitative measurements. A patient is prepared for a PET scan with an injection of slightly radioactive material such as molecules designed to mimic glucose as they travel through the body. Since cancerous tissues consume glucose, the scanner can then detect their location. PET technology can also be employed in the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's disease. Today, some 1,500 scanners are in use.*TIS



DEATHS

1748  Johann Bernoulli (aka Jean Bernouilli) (6 Aug 1667, 1 Jan 1748)Swiss mathematician  who is noted for his discovery of the exponential calculus (1691) and the equation of the catenary (1690). His first publication was on the process of fermentation (1690), but thereafter, he studied and taught mathematics for the rest of his life. He followed his his brother Jacques as professor of mathematics at Basle. He was the first to use g to represent the acceleration due to gravity. He applied the then new calculus to the measurement of curves, to differential equations, and to mechanical problems. He introduced the famous brachistochrome problem. “Archimedes of his age” was inscribed on his tombstone. The mathematician Daniel Bernoulli was his son.*TIS

1779 Jeremiah Fenwicke Dixon (27 July 1733 – 22 January 1779) was an English surveyor and astronomer who is best known for his work with Charles Mason, from 1763 to 1767, in determining what was later called the Mason-Dixon line.

Dixon was born in Cockfield, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham, the fifth of seven children, to Sir George Fenwick Dixon 5th Bt. and Lady Mary Hunter. His father was a wealthy Quaker coal mine owner and aristocrat. His mother came from Newcastle, and was said to have been "the cleverest woman" to ever marry into the Dixon family. Dixon became interested in astronomy and mathematics during his education at Barnard Castle. Early in life he made acquaintances with the eminent intellectuals of Southern Durham: mathematician William Emerson, and astronomers John Bird and Thomas Wright. In all probability it was John Bird, who was an active Fellow of the Royal Society, who recommended Dixon as a suitable companion to accompany Mason.
Jeremiah Dixon served as assistant to Charles Mason in 1761 when the Royal Society selected Mason to observe the transit of Venus from Sumatra. However, their passage to Sumatra was delayed, and they landed instead at the Cape of Good Hope where the transit was observed on June 6, 1761. Dixon returned to the Cape once again with Nevil Maskelyne's clock to work on experiments with gravity.
Dixon and Mason signed an agreement in 1763 with the proprietors of Pennsylvania and Maryland, Thomas Penn and Frederick Calvert, sixth Baron Baltimore, to assist with resolving a boundary dispute between the two provinces. They arrived in Philadelphia in November 1763 and began work towards the end of the year. The survey was not complete until late 1766, following which they stayed on to measure a degree of Earth's meridian on the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland, on behalf of the Royal Society. They also made a number of gravity measurements with the same instrument that Dixon had used with Maskelyne in 1761. Before returning to England in 1768, they were both admitted to the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge, in Philadelphia.
Dixon sailed to Norway in 1769 with William Bayly to observe another transit of Venus. The two split up, with Dixon at Hammerfest Island and Bayly at North Cape, in order to minimize the possibility of inclement weather obstructing their measurements. Following their return to England in July, Dixon resumed his work as a surveyor in Durham. He died unmarried in Cockfield on 22 January 1779, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Quaker cemetery in Staindrop.
Although he was recognized as a Quaker, he was not a very good one, dressing in a long red coat and occasionally drinking to excess. *Wik

1787 José Anastácio da Cunha (1744 in Lisbon, Portugal - 1 Jan 1787 in Lisbon, Portugal) was a Portuguese mathematician who wrote an encyclopaedia of mathematics.*SAU

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

1796 Alexandre-Theophile Vandermonde (28 Feb 1735 in Paris, France - 1 Jan 1796 in Paris, France) was a French mathematician best known for his work on determinants. *SAU

1896 Alfred Ely Beach (1 Sep 1826, 1 Jan 1896) was an American inventor and publisher of Scientific American magazine which reported on technology developments and patents in the 19th-century. It is still published today, one of the world's leading science magazines. Beach himself invented a tunneling shield and built the pneumatic tube subway which propelled a carriage by means of air pressure generated by huge fans. The tunnel was short - one block - so it operated as a demonstration (1870-73), with one station and train car. In 1856 he won First Prize and a gold medal at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition. Beach had invented a typewriter for the blind, resembling the modern typewriter in the arrangement of its keys and typebars, but embossed its letters on a narrow paper strip instead of a sheet. *TIS

1922 Wooster Woodruff Beman (May 28, 1850 - January 1, 1922). He attended school in Valparaiso, Ind., and entered the University of Michigan in 1866, receiving his B.A. degree in 1870. After teaching for a year at Kalamazoo College as instructor in Greek and mathematics, he returned to the University of Michigan as an instructor while also working for his master's degree, which he received in 1873. In 1874, he became assistant professor, in 1882 associate professor, and in 1887 full professor.
In addition to his teaching, Beman wrote books and articles on the history and teaching of elementary mathematics. Among his works are "Nature and Meaning of Numbers" (from the German), and "Continuity and Irrational Numbers." He was the joint author, with D. E. Smith, of "Plane and Solid Geometry," "Higher Arithmetic," "New Plane and Solid Geometry," "Elements of Algebra," "Academic Algebra," translations of "Famous Problems of Elementary Geometry," and "A Brief History of Mathematics." *Michigan Historical Collections



1992 Grace Hooper dies: The US Navy recalled 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 term "bug" in the meaning of technical error dates back at least to 1878 and Thomas Edison , and "debugging" seems to have been used as a term in aeronautics before entering the world of computers. Indeed, in an interview Grace Hopper​ remarked that she was not coining the term. The moth fit the already existing terminology, so it was saved.)
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
1995  Eugene Paul Wigner
Thumbnail - Eugene Paul Wigner (17 Nov 1902, 1 Jan 1995). Hungarian-American physicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics (with Maria Goeppert Mayer and Johannes Hans Jensen) for his insight into quantum mechanics, for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles. He made many contributions to nuclear physics and played a prominent role in the development of the atomic bomb and nuclear energy. *TIS

1996 Gertrude Blanch (2 Feb, 1897 (sometimes 1898) - 1 Jan,1996) was an American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation. After the war, Blanch's career was hampered by FBI suspicions that she was secretly a communist. Their evidence for this seems scarce, and included, for example, the observation that she had never married or had children. In what must have been a remarkable showdown, the diminutive fifty-year-old mathematician demanded, and won, a hearing to clear her name.
Subsequently, she worked for the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA and the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. She was one of the founders of the ACM.
She published over thirty papers on functional approximation, numerical analysis and Mathieu functions. In 1962, she was elected a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Blanch retired in 1967 at the age of 69, but continued working under a consulting contract for the Air Force for another year. Thereafter she moved to San Diego and continued to work on numerical solutions of Mathieu functions until her death in 1996, concentrating on the use of continued fractions to achieve highly accurate results in a small number of computational steps. This work has not been published. The Gertrude Blanch Papers, 1932-1996 are stored at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. *Wik


Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*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