On This Day in Math - April 8

For Bourbaki, Poincaré was the devil incarnate. For students of chaos and fractals, Poincaré is of course God on Earth.
~Marshall Stone
The 99th day of the year; there are 9 ways to express 99 as p + 2q, where p and q are prime. *Prime Curios (Students might wish to collect the whole set.)


If 99 divides some 4-digit number ABCD, then 99 also divides BCDA, CDAB, and DABC

There are 9 ways to express 99 as p + 2q, where p and q are prime.

99 is the largest number that is equal to the sum of its digits plus the product of its digits: 99 = 9 + 9 + 9 * 9

and 99 is the alphanumeric value of THIRTEEN *Number Gossip

99² = 9801 and 98 + 01 = 99 so it is a Kaprekar number, named after D. R. Kaprekar, an Indian recreational mathematician.

and David Marain ‏@dmarain recently reminded me 1/99² = 0.000102030405060708091011121314151617181920212223242526272... The question for students, It must be a repeating decimal, when does it start to repeat?

(and there was something about bottles of beer on the wall, but they don't seem to be there anymore. Maybe someone took them down...)

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EVENTS

1610 On 8 April Kepler received a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, and a few days later the Tuscan ambassador in Prague transmitted Galileo’s request for an opinion about the startling new telescopic discoveries. What a contrast with 1597, when Kepler, an unknown high-school teacher, had sought in vain Galileo’s reaction to his own book! Kepler was now the distinguished imperial mathematician, whose opinion mattered; he responded generously and quickly with a long letter of approval.
He promptly published his letter as dissertatio cum nuncio sidereo; in accepting the new observations with enthusiasm, he also reminded his readers of the earlier history of the telescope, his own work on the regular solids and on possible inhabitants of the moon, and his arguments against an infinite universe. A few months later, in the second of the only three known letters that Galileo wrote directly to Kepler, the Italian astronomer stated, “I thank you because you were the first one, and practically the only one, to have complete faith in my assertions.” *Encyclopedia.com
Thony Christie sent me some corrections on Kepler's introduction to this document:
"I quote from Mario Biagioli's Galileo Courtier:

Kepler's dedication of his Conversation with the Sidereal Messenger to Giuliano de' Medici (the Medici ambassador in Prague […]) offers interesting clues about the ways in which scientific networks were often embedded in noble patronage networks. Kepler acknowledged that he obtained a copy of the Sidereus from Giuliano de' Medici and that, when called to the Medici palace in Prague on April 13 [note date!], he was read Galileo's invitation to respond to the Sidereus, an invitation which was reinforced by the ambassador's "own exhortions". It is important to not that Kepler did not receive the letter from Galileo but that it was read to him by the Medici ambassador.

As you can see the copy of the Sidereus was sent by Galileo to Giuliano de' Medici who gave it to Kepler with what amounted to an order to write a criticism of it.
As always during their rather brief and fragmentary correspondence Galileo's behaviour towards Kepler was less than civil."
The University of Oklahoma has a digitized copy of Siderus Nunci with Galileo's signature on the title page.

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1794 Joseph and Mary Priestley sailed from England on April 8, 1794 and after a long and rough passage, reached New York on June 4th. They joined their sons who had preceded them and who were engaged in purchasing land in Pennsylvania where they hoped to found a settlement of English immigrants. Although Priestley was fully informed about this venture and had decided to join them in living in the settlement when it was established, he was not one of the planners and, in fact, was not overly enthusiastic about it.
During the 10 days he was in New York, he was visited by Governor Clinton and other leading citizens and several public expressions of welcome were made. However some of the local clergy used the occasion of Trinity Sunday, June 15th, to preach against Priestley's religious views. They appeared to fear his influence.
On June 18th, Priestley went on to Philadelphia where he was also honored and invited to stay. However, he was determined to press on to Northumberland to join his sons. At this time he seemed to have some idea that he would be able to live in the country, in Northumberland, and make frequent trips into the city of Philadelphia. *Bill Weston, A Brief Biography of Joseph Priestley

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1796 Guass enters in his diary a note that he has proved quadratic reciprocity. He will prove it again seven times in his life. Euler stated the theorem in 1783 without proof. Legendre was the first to publish a proof, but it was fallacious. Gauss became the first to publish a correct proof. The quadratic reciprocity theorem was Gauss's favorite theorem from number theory. He referred to it as the "aureum theorema" (golden theorem). The theorem says that if p and q are distinct odd primes, then the congruences x²=q (mod p) x²=p (mod q)are either both solvable, or both unsolvable except when they are both equal to 3 (mod 4). If they are both equal to 3 (mod 4) then one is solvable and the other is not *Mathworld, Wolfram

*Genial Guass Gottingen

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1799 The date of the still uninterpreted cryptic entry "REV. GALEN" in Gauss’s scientific diary. *VFR
There is a previous insertion that also remains uninterpreted.He entered "Vicimus GEGAN" for October 21, 1796.

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1829 After having met Niels Henrik Abel in Berlin, August Leopold Crelle had published his work in his journal, and tried to help him acquire a University position. After Abel returned to Norway he lived on gifts and loans that he never repaid. On the 8th of April, Crelle wrote to tell him that the University of Berlin had offered him a Professorship, not knowing that Abel had died of tuberculosis two days earlier. *John Derbyshire, Unknown Quantity

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1940 Samual F. B. Morse appears on a two cent stamp in the U.S.

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1943 The Rockerfeller Foundation review announced that the “differential analyzer” at MIT was built at a cost of $130,500.

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1991 Java development begins in earnest:
On this day, Sun's Java team moves from Sun Microsystems to work in secret on its "Oak" development project (later re-named "Java.")*CHM

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In 1947, the largest sunspot group recorded was observed on the sun's southern hemisphere. Its size was estimated at 7 billion square miles, or an area of 6100 millionths of the Sun's visible hemisphere. Sunspots are areas of somewhat cooler surface than the surrounding solar gases, and appear as dark spots on the solar surface. Astronomers measure the sizes of sunspots as millionth fractions of the Sun's visible area. Typically, a big sunspot measures 300 to 500 millionths, whereas the entire surface area of the Earth is only 169 millionths of the solar disk. *TIS

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BIRTHS

1608 Honoré Fabri (8 April 1608 in Le Grand Abergement, Ain, France - 8 March 1688 in Rome, Italy)was a French Jesuit who worked on astronomy, physics and mathematics. His lectureson natural philosophy were published in 1646 as Tractatus physicus de motu locali. In this work he uses the parallelogram law for forces, correctly applying it to deduce the law of reflection and the motion of a body acted on simultaneously by two forces.*SAU (This seems to be one of the earlier statements of the law)

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1732 David Rittenhouse (8 Apr 1732; died 26 Jun 1796 at age 64) American astronomer, instrument maker and inventor who was an early observer of the atmosphere of Venus. For observations for the transit of Venus on 3 Jun 1769, he constructed a high precision pendulum clock, an astronomical quadrant, an equal altitude instrument, and an astronomical transit. He was the first one in America to put spider web as cross-hairs in the focus of his telescope. He is generally credited with inventing the vernier compass and possibly the automatic needle lifter. He was professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin consulted him on various occasions. For Thomas Jefferson he standardized the foot by pendulum measurements in a project to establish a decimal system of weights and measures.*TIS I recently discovered a blog about Rittenhouse at The Renaissance Mathematicus by the wonderful Thony Christie that tells a wonderful story about Rittenhouse I had never heard.  So as not to spoil it, I'll tease you with the last line: "the man who worked so hard to witness a once in a lifetime event and then missed it."

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1779 Johann Salamo Christoph Schweigger (8 Apr 1779; 6 Sep 1857 at age 78)
German physicist who invented the galvanometer (1820), a device to measure the strength of an electric current. He developed the principle from Oersted's experiment (1819) which showed that current in a wire will deflect a compass needle. Schweigger realized that suggested a basic measuring instrument, since a stronger current would produce a larger deflection, and he increased the effect by winding the wire many times in a coil around the magnetic needle. He named this instrument a “galvanometer” in honour of Luigi Galvani, the professor who gave Volta the idea for the first battery. Thomas Seebeck (1770-1831) named the innovative coil, Schweigger's multiplier. It became the basis of moving coil instruments and loudspeakers. *TIS

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1903 Marshall Harvey Stone (April 8, 1903, New York City – January 9, 1989, Madras, India) was an American mathematician who contributed to real analysis, functional analysis, and the study of Boolean algebras. He is best known for the Stone-Weierstrass theorem on uniform approximation of continuous functions by polynomials.
Stone was the son of Harlan Fiske Stone, who was the Chief Justice of the United States in 1941–1946. Marshall Stone’s family expected him to become a lawyer like his father, but he became enamored of mathematics while he was a Harvard University undergraduate. He completed a Harvard Ph.D. in 1926, with a thesis on differential equations that was supervised by George David Birkhoff. Between 1925 and 1937, he taught at Harvard, Yale University, and Columbia University. Stone was promoted to a full Professor at Harvard in 1937. Stone did an outstanding job of making the Chicago department eminent again, mainly by hiring Paul Halmos, André Weil, Saunders Mac Lane, Antoni Zygmund, and Shiing-Shen Chern.*Wik

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1903 Aurel Friedrich Wintner (8 April 1903, Budapest, Hungary – 15 January 1958, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) was a mathematician noted for his research in mathematical analysis, number theory, differential equations and probability theory. He was one of the founders of probabilistic number theory. He received his Ph.D from the University of Leipzig in 1928 under the guidance of Leon Lichtenstein. *Wik
In 1929 he published the first proofs of the basic facts in Hilbert space— the fundamental mathematical construct in the then-developing physical theory of quantum mechanics. [DSB 14, 454] *VFR

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DEATHS

1461 Georg von Peurbach, (30 May 1423, 8 Apr 1461 at age 37) Austrian mathematician and astronomer who promoted the use of Arabic numerals (introduced 250 years earlier in place of Roman numerals), especially in a table of sines he calculated with unprecedented accuracy. He died before this project was finished, and his pupil, Regiomontanus continued it until his own death. Peurbach was a follower of Ptolomy's astronomy. He insisted on the solid reality of the crystal spheres of the planets, going somewhat further than in Ptolomy's writings. He calculated tables of eclipses in Tabulae Ecclipsium, observed Halley's comet in Jun 1456 and the lunar eclipse of 3 Sep 1457 from a site near Vienna. Peurbach wrote on astronomy, his observations and devised astronomical instruments.*TIS
Peuerbach's Theoricae Novae Planetarum, (New Theories of the Planets- below) was composed about 1454 was published in 1473 by Regiomontanus' printing press in Nuremburg. While the book was involved in attempting a technical resolution of the theories of Eudoxus and Ptolemy, Peuerbach claimed that the movement of the planets was determined by the Sun, and this has been seen as a step towards the Copernican theory. This book was read by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and became the standard astronomical text well into the seventeenth century.

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1913 Julius (Gyula )König (16 December 1849 – 8 April 1913) was a Hungarian mathematician. His mathematical publications in foreign languages appeared under the name Julius König. His son Dénes Kőnig is the famous graph theorist. Kőnig worked in many mathematical fields. His work on polynomial ideals, discriminants and elimination theory can be considered as a link between Leopold Kronecker and David Hilbert as well as Emmy Noether. Later on his ideas were simplified considerably, to the extent that today they are only of historical interest.
Kőnig already considered material influences on scientific thinking and the mechanisms which stand behind thinking.*Wik One of his early ideas was a paper of 1872 which looked at intuitive ways to prove the consistency of non-Euclidean geometries. He published many research papers in analysis, but his greatest significance in this area comes from the excellent textbooks which he wrote on the topic.*VFR

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1919 Roland Baron von Eötvös (27 Jul 1848, 8 Apr 1919 at age 70)was a Hungarian physicist who studied at Heidelberg where he was taught by Kirchhoff, Helmholtz and Bunsen. Eötvös introduced the concept of molecular surface tension and published on capillarity (1876-86). For the rest of his life he concentrated on study of the Earth's gravitational field. He developed the Eötvös torsion balance, long unsurpassed in precision, which gave experimental proof that inertial mass and gravitational mass, to a high degree of accuracy, are equivalent - which later was a major principle of Albert Einstein.*TIS

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1925 Frank Stephen Baldwin (10 Apr 1838, 8 Apr 1925 at age 87) American inventor best-known for his development of the Monroe calculator. Baldwin began in 1870 to experiment with the design of mechanical calculators. The device was patented and marketed in 1875 (No. 159,244). The improved 1875 machine initiated the development of the second fundamental principle in rotary four-rules calculators which became known as "The Baldwin Principle." Baldwin developed many more calculators during his life. His last model was the forerunner of the Monroe machine. The Monroe Calculator Company was formed in 1912 and was a pioneer in electric adding machines. The Monroe Calculator was used extensively in the 1930's. *TIS

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1968 Harold Delos Babcock (24 Jan 1882, 8 Apr 1968 at age 86) American astronomer who with his son, Horace, invented the solar magnetograph (1951), for detailed observation of the Sun's magnetic field. With their magnetograph the Babcocks measured the distribution of magnetic fields over the solar surface to unprecedented precision and discovered magnetically variable stars. In 1959 Harold Babcock announced that the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity periodically. Babcock's precise laboratory studies of atomic spectra allowed others to identify the first "forbidden" lines in the laboratory and to discover the rare isotopes of oxygen. With C.E. St. John he greatly improved the precision of the wavelengths of some 22,000 lines in the solar spectrum, referring them to newly-determined standards. *TIS

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2005, Douglas Geoffrey Northcott, FRS (31 December 1916, London – 8 April 2005) was a British mathematician who worked on ideal theory.
... while a prisoner of war, ... Northcott was able to think about mathematics; indeed, thinking about mathematics probably helped him survive his war experiences. Sometimes he tried to reconstruct proofs of results that he had learnt as a student; at other; he attempted to build up a theory of integration for functions with values in a Banach space. He recorded his results about this theory in a notebook that he kept in his gas-mask case. On one occasion his gas-mask was stolen and he never saw it again, and so he had to start again. His second notebook survived the war and, in due course, provided material for his Ph.D. thesis and his fellowship dissertation. *SAU

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2008 Graham Higman (19 Jan 1917 in Louth, Lincolnshire, England - 8 April 2008 in Oxford, England) is known for his outstanding work in all aspects of the theory of groups. He published on units in group rings, the subject of his doctoral thesis, in 1940 then there was a break in his publication record during the time he worked in the Meteorological Office. His 1948 papers are on somewhat different topics, being on topological spaces and linkages. They show the influences of Henry Whitehead and, to a lesser extent, Max Newman. *SAU

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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

On This Day in Math - April 7

The 98th day of the year, 98 is the smallest number that starts a sequence of three consecutive numbers with at least 3 prime divisors. (What would be the smallest number to start a sequence of four numbers with at least four prime divisors?)

I am creating the term ambinumerals (from ambigram) to describe pairs of numbers like 98 and 86 which are the rotation of the other as opposed to strobogrammatic numbers (like 808)

98 is the sum of three consecutive fourth powers, \(= 1^4 + 2^4 + 3^4 \)
and eight consecutive primes, = 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23

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EVENTS 1646  Torricelli sends "The geometry of indivisibles" To Michelangelo Ricci.  He communicated the “universal theorem,” still considered the most general possible even today, which allows determination of the center of gravity of any figure through the relation between two integrals. *Encylopedia.com (Torricelli would use this method to find the volume of Torricelli's Trumpet (today often called Gabriel's Horn).  A finite solid volume with an infinite surface area.

*Weisstein, Eric W. "Gabriel's Horn." From MathWorld

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1666 Perhaps the kindest rejection letter ever, John Pell to Samuel Morland. British Polymath Morland had considered writing a book on the "quadrature of curvlinear spaces" and sent a sample to Pell, who responded:

*A brief account of the life, writings, and inventions of Sir. S. Morland

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1794 Joseph Priestley  forever left England and traveled to the United States. Only a few years before, on 14 Jul 1791, his laboratory, home and library were burned to destruction by a mob of people angry at his support of the French Revolution. His French colleague, Lavoisier, was executed a week  after Priestley left England. Priestley's discovery of oxygen was 20 years earlier, on 1 Aug 1774. During the last years of his life in America he spent his time quietly writing, and furthering the cause of Unitarianism in the new nation.

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1795, France adopted by law, the metre as the unit of length and the base of the metric system. Since there had been no uniformity of French weights and measures prior to the Revolution, the Academy of Sciences had been charged on 8 May 1790 to organise a better system. Delambre and Méchain measured an arc of the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona, so that the metre could be defined as one ten-millionth part of the distance between the poles and the equator. *TIS

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1880 Charles Darwin sent a letter to Francis Galton to call his attention to a letter and circular on “a queer subject” (fingerprinting) from Henry Faulds. Darwin suggests that Galton might want to present it at the Anthropological Institute, which he did. In his response the next day Galton says that he had taken several thumb prints several years before after “having heard of the Chinese plan with criminals.”. *Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton

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1953 IBM 701 formally dedicated at a luncheon at which Oppenheimer was the principal speaker. It used electrostatic storage tubes, a magnetic drum, and magnetic tapes. In all, 19 of these ma­chines were built, and IBM was launched into the new world of electronic computers. [Goldstein, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, p. 328]*VFR

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1964 IBM Announces "System 360" Computer Family:
IBM announces the release of its "System 360" mainframe computer architecture--embodied in five new models--launching its most successful computer system of all time. Called the "360" because it was meant to address all possible sizes and types of customer with one unified software-compatible architecture, the 360 family of machines generated in excess of $100 billion in revenue for IBM.*CHM

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1970 The Netherlands issued a set of five stamps designed with the aid of a computer.Journal of Recreational Mathematics, 4(1971), 20–23, . *VFR

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1978 An editorial in the Pensacola Journal on minimum competency in English and mathematics stated, “After all, if you give the test to four students and four flunk, that’s a 50 percent failure rate.” [The AMATYC Journal, 13(1979), 59]

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1981 The fastest computation of the 13th root of a 100-digit number is in 1 minute and 28.8 seconds by Willem Klein. [Guinness]

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1989 To start his after-dinner remarks at a meeting of the Ohio Section of the MAA, Gerald Alexanderson told the following story that he had heard from Polya, who heard it from Lebesgue: At the coliseum in Rome the emperor ordered a lion to be brought into the arena with a christian. The christian whispered something in the lion’s ear and the lion became meek and whimpered away. This scene was repeated with increasingly ferocious lions. Finally the emperor told the christian that he could go free if he would tell him what he was saying to the lion. The response was truly frightening: “After dinner you have to give a speech.”

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BIRTHS

1768 François Joseph Français (7 April 1768 in Saverne, Bas-Rhin, France - 30 Oct 1810 in Mainz, Germany)  Much of François Français's work was published after his death by his brother who added to it in a way to make the contribution of each hard to distinguish. François worked on partial differential equations and his memoir of 1795 on this topic was developed further and presented to the Académie des Sciences in 1797. Lacroix praised Français' work and described it as making a major contribution to the study of partial differential equations; however, it was not published.*SAU

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1823 Guillaume-Jules Hoüel (April 7, 1823 in Thaon; June 14, 1886 in Périers) was a French mathematician. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1843. He originally did research on celestial mechanics, but later became interested in Non-Euclidean geometry and corresponded with Joseph Tilly.*Wik
Hoüel became interested in non-euclidean geometry once he had been made aware of the work of Bolyai and Lobachevsky. He published translations of many important works by Bolyai, Beltrami, Helmholtz and Riemann. He corresponded with Tilly on non-euclidean geometry. *SAU

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1866 Erik Ivar Fredholm (April 7, 1866 – August 17, 1927)  Swedish mathematician who is remembered for Fredholm integral equations with applications in mathematical physics and actuarial science. His first paper (1890) was on a special class of functions inspired by the heat equation. His 1898 doctoral dissertation involved a study of partial differential equations motivated by an equilibrium problem in elasticity. Fredhlom also had a career in actuarial science and from 1902 onwards he studyied various questions in this area, including an elegant formula he proposed to determine the surrender value of a life insurance policy. He built a machine to solve differential equations. David Hilbert extended one of Fredholm's integral equations discoving Hilbert spaces on which would be built the quantum theory.*TIS

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1923 Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923 – 6 November 2010) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during the Second World War. Hilton's principal research interests were in algebraic topology, homological algebra, categorical algebra, and mathematics education. He published 15 books and over 600 articles in these areas, some jointly with colleagues.*Wik

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DEATHS

1823 Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles (12 Nov 1746, 7 Apr 1823 at age 76) French mathematician, physicist, and inventor. When Benjamin Franklin visited France in 1779, Charles was inspired to study physics. He soon became an eloquent speaker to non-scientific audiences. His lectures and demonstrations attracted notable patrons and helped popularize Franklin's theory of electricity and other new scientific concepts. With Nicolas and Anne-Jean Robert, he made several balloon ascents, and was the first to use hydrogen for balloon inflation (1783). Charles invented most of the equipment that is still used in today's balloons. About 1787 he developed Charles's law concerning the thermal expansion of gases that for a gas at constant pressure, its volume is directly proportional to its absolute temperature. *TIS

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1889 Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond (2 December 1831 – 7 April 1889) was a German mathematician who was born in Berlin and died in Freiburg. He was the brother of Emil du Bois-Reymond.
His thesis was concerned with the mechanical equilibrium of fluids. He worked on the theory of functions and in mathematical physics. His interests included Sturm–Liouville theory, integral equations, variational calculus, and Fourier series. In this latter field, he was able in 1873 to construct a continuous function whose Fourier series is not convergent (more specifically, that diverges at every point). His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost everywhere.
Du Bois-Reymond also established that a trigonometric series that converges to a continuous function at every point is the Fourier series of this function.
He developed a theory of infinitesimals in Über die Paradoxen des Infinitär-Calcüls ("On the paradoxes of the infinitary calculus") in 1877. He wrote,

The infinitely small is a mathematical quantity and has all its properties in common with the finite ... A belief in the infinitely small does not triumph easily. Yet when one thinks boldly and freely, the initial distrust will soon mellow into a pleasant certainty ... A majority of educated people will admit an infinite in space and time, and not just an "unboundedly large". But they will only with difficulty believe in the infinitely small, despite the fact that the infinitely small has the same right to existence as the infinitely large ...
*Wik

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1933 Raymond Edward Alan Christopher Paley,(7 January 1907 – 7 April 1933)  was killed at age 26 in an avalanche while skiing near Banff, Alberta, Canada. G. H. Hardy wrote of this young analyst: “There is something very intimidating to an older man in such youthful quickness and power, and of all the people who frightened me when I came back to Cambridge, Paley was the man who frightened me the most.” [Collected Papers of G. H. Hardy, vol. 7, p. 745.]*VFR (He was buried in Banff)
His contributions include the Paley construction for Hadamard matrices (closely related to the Paley graphs in graph theory) and his collaboration with Norbert Wiener in the Paley–Wiener theorem (harmonic analysis). He collaborated with A. Zygmund on Fourier series (see also Paley–Zygmund inequality) and worked with J. E. Littlewood on what became known as Littlewood–Paley theory, an application of real-variable techniques in complex analysis. *Wik

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1934 Ernst Paul Heinz Prüfer (10 Nov 1896 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany - 7 April 1934 in Münster, Germany)proved important results about abelian groups.*SAU
He worked on abelian groups, algebraic numbers, knot theory and Sturm-Liouville theory. His advisor was Issai Schur.*Wik

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1986 : Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich (19 Jan 1912, 7 Apr 1986 at age 74)  Soviet mathematician and economist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Economics with Tjalling Koopmans for their work on the optimal allocation of scarce resources. Kantorovich's background was entirely in mathematics but he showed a considerable feel for the underlying economics to which he applied the mathematical techniques. He was one of the first to use linear programming as a tool in economics and this appeared in a publication Mathematical methods of organising and planning production which he published in 1939. The mathematical formulation of production problems of optimal planning was presented here for the first time and the effective methods of their solution and economic analysis were proposed *TIS

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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

On This Day in Math - April 6

Abel Statue at Univ of Oslo, *Monuments on Mathematicians

Niels Henrik Abel
1802 - 1829
mathematician, famed due to
epoch-making works in
theory of equations, [theory of] infinite series
and elliptic functions

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

~Isaac Asimov

The 97th day of the year; The number formed by the concatenation of odd numbers from one to 97 is prime. (1+3+5+7+9+11+13+15+17+... 93+95+97  quick students, how many digits will it have?) *Prime Curios

And from Cliff Pickover, 97 is the largest prime that we can ever find that is less than the sum of square of its digits 9² + 7²  > 97

There are 97 leap days every 400 years in the Gregorian Calendar
97 is the smallest prime that has a prime alphabetical value in its Roman numerals-based representation (XCVII): 24 + 3 + 22 + 9 + 9 = 67 *Number Gossip 

The longest whole-number name consisting entirely of alternating consonants and vowels is NINETY-SEVEN. However, if all integers are allowed, NEGATIVE NINETY-SEVEN would qualify.

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EVENTS

648 B.C. First Greek record of a total solar eclipse is made. See June 4, 780 B.C., and October 13, 2128 B.C. *VFR

"Zeus, the father of the Olympic Gods, turned mid-day into night,
hiding the light of the dazzling Sun; and sore fear came upon men."
"Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous,
now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday,
hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind.
After this, men can believe anything, expect anything.
~ Archilochus, Greek poet

*Ted Pedas, Eclipse History web site.

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1741 Euler's First paper on partitions is given. (This may be where generating functions are first used). On September 4, 1740, Philip Naudé the younger (1684-1747) wrote Euler from Berlin to ask “how many ways can the number 50 be written as a sum of seven different positive integers?” The problem seems to have captured Euler’s imagination. Euler gave his first answer on April 6, 1741, in a paper he read at the weekly meeting of the St. Petersburg Academy. That paper was published ten years later and is number 158 on Eneström’s index. (Ed Sandifer, "How Euler Did It") [E158 can be downloaded in English from Euler Project]

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1841 William Thompson, the future Lord Kelvin, age 16, was formally entered at St. Peter's (or Peterhouse) Cambridge as a student of the college. His father, Professor James Thompson, may have urged him to enter Peterhouse because of the college's mathematical coach, Hopkins, whom Professor Kelvin admired. It would become the college of choice for many young Scots for a while. Tait went there, and Maxwell began there but later transferred to Trinity. *Silvanus Phillips Thompson, The life of Lord Kelvin

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1852, Edward Sabine announced that the 11 year sunspot cycle was "absolutely identical" with the geomagnetic cycle. Later, using a larger dataset, Rudolf Wolf confirmed this fact. Since Newton's explanation of the effect of the sun's gravity on earth, this was the first new phenomenon of the sun interacting with the earth. Thus began continuing studies of the solar-terrestrial activity. Sabine was an Irish geophysicist, astronomer, and explorer, who made extensive pendulum measurements to determine the shape of the earth, and established magnetic observatories to relate sunspot activity with disturbances in terrestrial magnetism. Sabine was knighted in 1869.

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In 1869, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City was officially created with the signing of a bill by the Governor of New York, John Thompson Hoffman. The museum began from the efforts of Albert Smith Bickmore, one-time student of Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, who was successful in his proposal to create a natural history museum in Central Park, New York City, with the support of William E. Dodge, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., Joseph Choate, and J. Pierpont Morgan. It opened to the public 27 Apr 1871. With a series of exhibits, the Museum's collection went on view for the first time in the Central Park Arsenal, the Museum's original home, on the eastern side of Central Park. *TIS

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1909 Ernst Zermelo (1871–1953) liked to argue that it is impossible for anyone ever to reach the North Pole, because the amount of whiskey needed to reach any latitude is proportional to the tangent of that latitude. Unaware of this argument, Robert E. Peary wrote in his diary on this date. “The Pole at last!!! The prize of 3 centuries, my dream & ambition for 23 years. Mine at last. I cannot bring myself to realize it. It all seems so simple ... .” Peary, his remarkable Black associate, Matthew Henson, and four Eskimos were the first humans to reach the North Pole. See The National Geographic Society. 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery (1987), pp. 53 & 59. [Reid, Hilbert, p. 97.]*VFR

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1922 Emmy Noether named “unofficial associate professor” at Gottingen. This purely honorary position reveals the strong prejudice of the day against women. [DSB 10, 138 and A. Dick, xiii.] Thony Christie sent me a note that says "In 1922 Emmy Noether was appointed 'außerordentliche Professur' which is not an 'unofficial associate professor' but is an official professorial post without a chair. " Thanks, Thony

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1929 To celebrate the centenary of the Death of Neils Henrik Abel, Norway issued a set of stamps in his honor. This is the first set of stamps honoring a mathematician in Philatelic history.

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1938 DuPont researcher Roy Plunkett and his assistant, Jack Rebok, discovered polytetrafluoroethy­lene, the slipperiest man-made substance. Teflon became a household word in 1960 when Teflon-coated frying pans were introduced. The Manhattan Project used it in producing Uranium-235, for it was the only gasket material that would contain the corrosive hexaflouride.

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In 1955, a report that Jupiter emitted radio waves was the subject of a page-length column of the New York Times. Discovered by Bernard F. Burke and Kenneth L. Franklin, astronomers at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, the waves resembled short bursts of static, similar to the interference on home radios caused by lightning. This was the first time radio waves were detected from any planet in our solar system. The astronomers announced their find at the semi-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Princeton, N.J. Discovered at first by chance, it took several weeks to pinpoint Jupiter as the origin, rather than any local source on Earth.*TIS

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1956 The first circular office building, the Capital Tower, at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles, was dedicated. The building has a diameter of 92 feet and a height of 150 feet. Above the 13 floors was a 90 foot spire from which a beacon flashed the word “Hollywood” in Morse code. *FFF

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1963 Watson-Watt is remembered as the inventor of Radar, for which he received a patent on April 2, 1935. Twenty-eight years later he read a poem in a science meeting in San Francisco about the strange twist of Technological Karma that led to his getting a speeding ticket in Canada in 1956. Reportedly he told the officer who stopped him, "If I knew what you were going to do with it, I would never have invented it." The poem reads:

Pity Sir Watson-Watt,
strange target of this radar plot
and thus, with others I can mention,
the victim of his own invention.
His magical all-seeing eye
enabled cloud-bound planes to fly
but now by some ironic twist
it spots the speeding motorist
and bites, no doubt with legal wit,
the hand that once created it.

Oh Frankenstein who lost control
of monster man created whole,
with fondest sympathy regard
one more hoist with his petard.
As for you courageous boffins
who may be nailing up your coffins,
particularly those whose mission
deals in the realm of nuclear fission,
pause and contemplate fate's counter plot
and learn with us what's Watson-Watt.

*nndb.com

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1967 Spain issued a stamp picturing Averroes (1126–1198) physician and philosopher. [Scott #1461] *VFR

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1972 Cray Research is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray.

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1992 Microsoft Releases Windows 3.1:
Microsoft Corporation releases Windows 3.1, an operating system that provided IBM and IBM-compatible PCs with a graphical user interface (though Windows was not the first such interface for PCs). Retail price was $149.00. In replacing the previous DOS command line interface with its Windows system, however, Microsoft created a program similar to the Macintosh operating system, and was sued by Apple for copyright infringement. (Microsoft later prevailed in this suit).
Windows 3.1 added multimedia extensions allowing support for sound cards, MIDI, and CD Audio, Super VGA (800 x 600) monitors, and increased the speed of modem it would support to 9600 bps. It also finally abandoned "Real Mode," a vestigial environment dating back to the 8086 CPU. It provided scalable fonts and trapped the "three finger salute" (CTRL-ALT-DEL), prompting the user to avoid inadvertent re-boots. It also refined its OLE (Object Linking and embedding) concept, allowing users to cut and paste between applications.*CHM

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1995 Stephen Hawking, in response to a request for a "time travel equation" from the editors of THE FACE magazine, sent the following fax: "Thank you for your recent fax. I do not have any equations for time travel. If I had, I would win the National Lottery every week."  *Letters of Note web site

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2006 "Beam me up, Scotty!" A patent application was filed for a "Full body teleportation system" described as : A pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another.
To my knowledge it has not been approved. Supporting documentation includes "in which the inventor (“he”) personally experienced a full-body teleportation while walking to the bus stop" More here

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BIRTHS

1749 Samuel Vince (6 April 1749; Fressingfield – 28 November 1821; Ramsgate) was an English clergyman, mathematician and astronomer at the University of Cambridge.
The son of a plasterer, Vince was admitted as a sizar to Caius College, Cambridge in 1771. In 1775 he was Senior Wrangler, and Winner of the Smith Prize at Cambridge. Migrating to Sidney Sussex College in 1777, he gained his M.A. in 1778 and was ordained a clergyman in 1779.
He was awarded the Copley Medal in 1780 and was Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge from 1796 until his death.
As a mathematician, Vince wrote on many aspects of his expertise, including logarithms and imaginary numbers. His Observations on the Theory of the Motion and Resistance of Fluids and Experiments upon the Resistance of Bodies Moving in Fluids had later importance to aviation history. He was also author of the influential A Complete System of Astronomy (3 vols. 1797-1808).
Vince also published the pamphlet The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, In Answer to Mr. Hume's Objections; In Two Discourses Preached Before the University of Cambridge by the Rev. S. Vince. In this work, Vince made an apology of the Christian religion and, like Charles Babbage, sought to present rational arguments in favor of the belief in miracles, against David Hume's criticism. *Wik

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1801 William Hallowes Miller (6 Apr 1801; 20 May 1880 at age 79) Welsh minerologist known for his Millerian indices built on his system of reference axes for crystals by which the different systems of crystal forms can be designated using a a set of three integers for each crystal face. When he published this scheme in A Treatise on Crystallography (1839), he provided an alternative to the existing confusion due to the many different descriptive systems previously in use. In his early career he published successful textbooks for hydrostatics and hydrodynamics (1831) and differential calculus (1833). Miller also prepared new standards in 1843 to replace the National Standards of weight and length that had been lost in the 1834 fire that destroyed the Parliament buildings. *TIS For an interesting story about how mathematics was related to the fire, read here.

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1890 André-Louis Danjon (6 Apr 1890; 21 Apr 1967 at age 76) French astronomer who devised a now standard five-point scale for rating the darkness and colour of a total lunar eclipse, which is known as the Danjon Luminosity Scale. He studied Earth's rotation, and developed astronomical instruments, including a photometer to measure Earthshine - the brightness of a dark moon due to light reflected from Earth. It consisted of a telescope in which a prism split the Moon's image into two identical side-by-side images. By adjusting a diaphragm to dim one of the images until the sunlit portion had the same apparent brightness as the earthlit portion on the unadjusted image, he could quantify the diaphragm adjustment, and thus had a real measurement for the brightness of Earthshine.*TIS

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1903 Harold Eugene Edgerton (6 Apr 1903; 4 Jan 1990 at age 86) was an American engineer and ultra-high-speed photographer who, as a graduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1926), used a strobe light in his studies, which,. 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

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1947 Michael Worboys (born April 6, 1947, ) is a British mathematician and computer scientist. He is professor of spatial informatics and director of the School of Computing and Information Science at the University of Maine.
Worboys is mostly known for his research on the computational and mathematical foundations of Geographic Information Science (GIS). In 1993 he founded the GIS Research UK (GISRUK) conference series, which is still held annually. With Matt Duckham, he wrote the well-known text book GIS: a computing perspective.*Wik

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DEATHS

1528 Albrecht Durer (21 May 1471, 6 April 1528)
German artist who published a book on geometric constructions (1535) using a straight-edge and compass. Although designed to enable artists better represent a natural three-dimensional scene on a canvas, Dürer included careful proofs to establish the validity of the constructions. In this respect, it could be regarded as the oldest surviving text on applied mathematics. He also wrote on the proportions of the human body.*TIS

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1829 Niels Henrik Abel, age 26, died of tuberculosis. In 1929 Norway issued four stamps for the centenary of his death. [Scott #145–148] Neils Henrik Abel was born at Fomm¨oy, a small island near Stavanger in Norway. Before going to the university in 1821 he attacked, with the vigor and immodesty of youth, the problem of the solution of the quintic equation. He submitted a solution for publication but found an error before it was published. In 1823 he proved the impossibility of a solution involving radicals that solves fifth or higher degree equations. *VFR
He developed the concept of elliptic functions independently of Carl Gustav Jacobi, and the theory of Abelian integrals and functions became a central theme of later 19th-century analysis. He had difficulty finding an academic position, was troubled by poverty, and died in poverty in his late twenties.*TIS
I love Abel's comment on Gauss' writing style, "He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail."
The early death of this talented mathematician, of whom Adrien-Marie Legendre said "quelle tête celle du jeune Norvégien!" ("what a head the young Norwegian has"), cut short a career of extraordinary brilliance and promise. Under Abel's guidance, the prevailing obscurities of analysis began to be cleared, new fields were entered upon and the study of functions so advanced as to provide mathematicians with numerous ramifications along which progress could be made. His works, the greater part of which originally appeared in Crelle's Journal, were edited by Bernt Michael Holmboe and published in 1839 by the Norwegian government, and a more complete edition by Ludwig Sylow and Sophus Lie was published in 1881. The adjective "abelian", derived from his name, has become so commonplace in mathematical writing that it is conventionally spelled with a lower-case initial "a" (e.g., abelian group, abelian category, and abelian variety). (Wikipedia)

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1963 Otto Struve (12 Aug 1897, 6 Apr 1963 at age 65) Russian-American astronomer who was a fourth generation astronomer, the great-grandson of Friedrich Struve. He made detailed spectroscopic investigations of stars, especially close binaries and peculiar stars, the interstellar medium (where he discovered H II regions), and gaseous nebulae. He contributed to the understanding of the broadening of spectral lines due to stellar rotation, electric fields, and turbulence and worked to separate these effects from each other and from chemical abundances. He was a pioneer in the study of mass transfer in closely interacting binary stars. Struve emigrated to the USA (1921) and joined the Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin, becoming its director in 1932. *TIS

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1992 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

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1993 John Charles Burkill FRS (1 February 1900 Holt, Norfolk, England – 6 April 1993 Sheffield, England) was an English mathematician who worked on analysis and introduced the Burkill integral. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1953*Wik

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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

On This Day in Math - April 5

How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?
~Joseph Bertrand

The 96th day of the year; 96 is the smallest number that can be written as the difference of 2 squares in 4 ways. *What's So Special About This Number?  
(students are encouraged to find them all...Is there a smaller number that can be so expressed in 3 ways?)

The sum of 96 consecutive squared integers is a square number ( \( x^2 + (x+1)^2 + (x+2)^2 +(x+3)^2 + \dotsm + (x+95)^2 = y^2 \) ) can be solved with eight sets of 96 consecutive year days. One solution is \( 13^2 + 14^2 + \dotsm + 108^2 = 652^2 \) *Ben Vitale

1/4 of the integers less than 96 are prime, The smallest integer n for which (n) = n/4.

96 is also the difference of consecutive factorials, and the difference of two powers of two.

EVENTS

1610 Writing to Galileo, Kepler was impressed by the observation that stars seen through the telescope still sparkled, in contrast to the circular appearance of planets. He asked:

"What other conclusion shall we draw from this difference, Galileo, than that the fixed stars generate their light from within, whereas the planets, being opaque, are illuminated from without; that is, to use Bruno’s terms, the former are suns, the latter, moons, or earths?"

*Steven Soter, Ciclops.org

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1752 Taxes are due in England. Previously they were due on March 25, the first day of the year, but because the adoption of the Gregorian calendar reform necessitated the dropping of eleven days, the tax date was changed also. Apparently the tax collectors couldn’t do fractions. *VFR

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In 1753, the British Museum was founded by an Act of Parliament granting £20,000 to purchase the 50,000 volume library of Sir Hans Sloane and his vast collection of 69,352 items of nature and art. Sloane was a prominent London physician who made the collection available in his will at much below its intrinsic value. Montagu House, Bloomsbury, was purchased in 1754 by the government to house this and other collections. Since it opened, on 15 Jan 1759, the Museum has been collecting, conserving and studying millions of artefacts. The British Museum established its Research Laboratory in 1920 with the appointment of Dr Alexander Scott as its first scientist.*TIS The myth that Sloan had invented the process of Hot Chocolate, which is still strongly promoted in the shops in Chelsea that feature this product, is a myth. See James Delbourgo's Article on Sloan and Cocoa here. Skipping to page 78 for details of the history of Chocolate in use around Europe in the 17th century. It had been used for much longer by the natives of South America with some apparent religious or spiritual relationship.

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1792 George Washington cast the first presidential veto in the USA. Amazingly, mathematics was involved. It seemed so easy. The 1787 US Constitution laid out simple rules for deciding how many representatives each state shall receive:
"Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, ... The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative ...". It may have seemed easy, but for the 200+ years of US government, the question of "Who gets how many?" continues to perplex and promote controversy. When congress discussed mathematical methods of applying this constitutional directive there were two methods of prime consideration, Jefferson's method, and Hamilton's method. Congress selected Hamilton's method and in the first use of the Presidential veto . President Washington rejected the bill. Congress submitted and passed another bill using Jefferson's method. The method used has changed frequently over the years with a method by Daniel Webster adopted in 1842, (the original 65 Representatives had grown to 223) and then replaced with Hamilton's method in 1852 (234 Representatives). In a strange "Only in America" moment in 1872, the congress reapportioned without actually adopting an official method and some analysis suggest that the difference caused Rutherford Hayes to win instead of Samuel Tilden who would have won had Hamilton's method been used. Since 1931 the US House has had 435 Representatives with the brief exception of when Alaska and Hawaii became states. Then there was a temporary addition of one seat for each until the new apportionment after the 1960 Census. In 1941 the Huntington-Hill Method was adopted and has remained in continuous (and contentious) use ever since.(Pat B)

Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting

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1800 A UFO sighting near Baton Rouge, Louisiana will be reported to the American Philosophical Society by Thomas Jefferson, President of the society, and (at that time) Vice-President of the United States. The report of a UFO by a Vice-President is still the highest government official to report a UFO. The report itself was written by the naturalist William Dunbar: "A phenomenon was seen to pass Baton Rouge on the night of the 5th April 1800, of which the following is the best description I have been able to obtain. It was first seen in the South West, and moved so rapidly, passing over the heads of the spectators, as to disappear in the North East in about a quarter of a minute. It appeared to be of the size of a large house, 70 or 80 feet long"

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In 1881, Hermann von Helmholtz presented The Faraday Lecture before the Fellows of the Chemical Society in London. His topic was The Modern Development of Faraday's Conception of Electricity. Helmholtz recognized Michael Faraday as being the person who most advanced the general scientific method, saying “His principal aim was to express in his new conceptions only facts, with the least possible use of hypothetical substances and forces.” *TIS

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1893, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, then Superintendent of Weights and Measures, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, decided that the International Meter and Kilogram would in the future be regarded as the fundamental standards of length and mass in the United States, both for metric and customary weights and measures. This decision, which has come to be known as "The Mendenhall Order," was first published as Bulletin No. 26 of the Coast and Geodetic Survey under the title Fundamental Standards of Length and Mass. The Mendenhall Order initiated a departure from the previous policy of attempting to maintain our standards of length and mass to be identical with those of Great Britain.*TIS (And after all this time we have completely converted to metric ;-] )

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1955 On the 5th of April, 1955, Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell sent a following letter to Albert Einstein along with a rough draft of what would soon be known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto - a written warning to the world's population on the dangers of nuclear weapons, and a plea for all leaders to avoid war when faced with conflict - and asked him to be both a signatory and supporter. Einstein's short reply, and in fact the last letter he ever wrote, arrived a week later:

Dear Bertrand Russell,
Thank you for your letter of April 5. I am gladly willing to sign your excellent statement. I also agree with your choice of the prospective signers.

With kind regards,

A. Einstein.

Einstein passed away on the 18th of that month, and the manifesto was released to the public on July 9th.
* Shaun Usher, Letters of Note Web site

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In 1963, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission gave the Fermi Award to J. Robert Oppenheimer for research in nuclear energy. Oppenheimer was the chief scientist of the Manhattan Project during WWII that created the atomic bomb. Later, he opposed the more destructive hydrogen bomb development and his security clearance was revoked (1954). Nine years later, a wiser U.S. government awarded Oppenheimer the prestigious Fermi Award, "For contributions to theoretical physics as a teacher and originator of ideas, and for leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during critical years." The actual presentation of the medal and $50,000 was made 2 Dec 1963 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. *TIS
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

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BIRTHS

1588- Thomas Hobbes(5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English scholar and amateur mathematician who wrote on optics and on geometry. He attacked the 'new' methods of mathematical analysis. Hobbes was caught in a series of conflicts from the time of publishing his De Corpore in 1655. In Leviathan he had assailed the system of the original universities. Because Hobbes was so evidently opposed to the existing academic arrangements, and because De Corpore contained not only tendentious views on mathematics, but an unacceptable proof of the squaring of the circle (which was apparently an afterthought), mathematicians took him to be a target for polemics. John Wallis was not the first such opponent, but he tenaciously pursued Hobbes. The resulting controversy continued well into the 1670s. *Wik

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1607 Honor´e Fabri, or Honoratus Fabrius,(1607 in Ain, France; 8 March 1688 at Rome,) He developed the infinitesimal methods of Cavalieri and Torricelli and his quadrature of the cycloid inspired Leibniz. Some of his geometrical work boils down to special cases of xn sin x dx, sinn x dx and arcsin x dx dy. [DSB 4, 506] *VFR In his treatise on man he claims to have discovered the circulation of the blood, prior to William Harvey, but after having investigated this question, Father Auguste Bellynck arrives at the conclusion that, at best, Father Fabri may have made the discovery independently of Harvey. *Wik

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1622 – Vincenzo Viviani,(April 5, 1622 – September 22, 1703) Italian mathematician In 1639, at the age of 17, he was an assistant of Galileo Galilei in Arcetri. He remained a disciple until Galileo's death in 1642. From 1655 to
1656, Viviani edited the first edition of Galileo's collected works. He was a leader in his field and founded the Accademia del Cimento. As one of the first important scientific societies, this organization came before England's Royal Society. In 1639, at age 17, he became the student, secretary and assistant of Galileo (now blind) in Arcetri, until Galileo died in 1642. A note from Thony Christie informed me that after Galileo's death, his papers were being used by the local butcher to wrap his meat and sausages until Viviani rescued what was left of them.

During his long career, Viviani published a number of books on mathematical and scientific subjects. He edited the first edition of Galileo's collected works (1655-1656), and worked tirelessly to have his master's memory rehabilitated. In 1660, together with Borelli, he measured the velocity of sound by timing the difference between the flash and the sound of a cannon. They obtained the value of 350 metres per second.*TIS
Viviani's Theorem is named for him. The theorem states that in an equilateral triangle, the sum of the perpendicular distances to the sides is equal to the altitude of the triangle. In the figure h=PE+PF+PG. If the point is outside the triangle, the relationship will still hold if one or more of the perpendiculars is treated as a negative value. The theorem can be generalized to a regular n-gon to state, for any point P interior to a regular n-gon, the sum of the perpendicular distances to the n sides is n times the apothem of the figure.

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1877 Georg Faber (5 April 1877 in Kaiserslautern, Germany - 7 March 1966 in Munich, Germany) Faber's most important work was on the polynomial expansion of functions. This is the problem of expanding an analytical function in an area bounded by a smooth curve as a sum of polynomials, where the polynomials are determined by the area. These polynomials are now known as 'Faber polynomials' and first appear in Faber's 1903 paper Über polynomische Entwickelungen published in Mathematische Annalen. Another important paper which he also published in Mathematische Annalen, this time in 1909, was Über stetige Funktionen. In this paper he introduced the 'hierarchical basis' and explicitly used it for the representation of functions. In fact Faber was building on the idea of Archimedes who computed approximately using a hierarchy of polygonal approximations of a circle. Only in the 1980s was Faber's idea seen to be an important ingredient for the efficient solution of partial differential equations. One further achievement of Faber is worthy of mention. In 1894 Lord Rayleigh made the following claim:" ... given a fixed area of ox-hide to make a drum, the ground tone is lowest if you make your drum circular. " Two mathematicians independently verified Rayleigh's conjecture, Faber and Edgar Krahn. *SAU

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1901 Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai (April 5, 1901 Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu - 31 August 1950, Cairo, Egypt) was an Nagercoil native Indian mathematician specializing in number theory. His contribution to Waring's problem was described in 1950 by K. S. Chandrasekharan as "almost certainly his best piece of work and one of the very best achievements in Indian Mathematics since Ramanujan". In number theory, a Pillai prime, named for him, is a prime number p for which there is an integer n > 0 such that the factorial of n is one less than a multiple of the prime, but the prime is not one more than a multiple of n. To put it algebraically, \(n! \equiv -1 \mod p but p \not\equiv 1 \mod n \). The first few Pillai primes are 23, 29, 59, 61, 67, 71, 79, 83, 109, 137, 139, 149, 193, ... (sequence A063980 in OEIS). *Wik

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1911 Computer Pioneer Cuthbert Hurd Is Born:
 The mathematician son of an itinerant preacher, IBM President Thomas Watson Sr. hired Hurd in early 1949 as IBM's second Ph.D. A figure generally unknown to history, Hurd quietly encouraged IBM upper management to enter into the computer field, convincing them in the early 1950s that a market for scientific computers existed after a cross-country sales trip revealed pent-up demand. At the time, IBM enjoyed large profits from its traditional punch card accounting business so the change was difficult for IBM to make internally. Hurd's first great success was in selling 10 of IBM's 701 computers, its first commercial scientific machine which rented for $18,000 a month. Shortly thereafter, he became manager of the IBM team that invented and developed the FORTRAN programming language under John Backus. Hurd died on May 22, 1996 in Portola Valley, California.*CHM

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1911 Walter Warwick Sawyer (or W. W. Sawyer) (April 5,1911–February 15, 2008) was a mathematician, mathematics educator and author, who taught on several continents.
Born in London, England , he attended Highgate School and was an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, obtaining a BA in 1933. He was an assistant lecturer in mathematics from 1933 to 1937 at University College, Dundee and from 1937 to 1944 at Manchester University. From 1945 to 1947, he was the head of mathematics at Leicester College of Technology.
In 1948 W. W. Sawyer became the first head of the mathematics department of what is now the University of Ghana. From 1951 to 1956, he was at Canterbury College (now the University of Canterbury in New Zealand). He left Canterbury College to become an associate professor at the University of Illinois, where he worked from winter 1957 through June 1958. While there, he criticized the New Math movement, which included the people who had hired him. From 1958 to 1965, he was a professor of mathematics at Wesleyan University. In the fall of 1965 he became a professor at the University of Toronto, appointed to both the College of Education and the Department of Mathematics. He retired in 1976.
W. W. Sawyer was the author of some 11 books. He is probably best known for his semi-popular works Mathematicians Delight and Prelude to Mathematics. Both of these have been translated into many languages. Mathematician's Delight was still in print 65 years after it was written. Some mathematicians have credited these books with helping to inspire their choice of a career.
W.W. Sawyer died on February 15, 2008, at the age of 96. He was survived by a daughter, Anne. *Wik
His first book "Mathematician’s Delight" (1943), was written with the aim "to dispel the fear of mathematics." It is one of the most successful math book ever written, going through numerous editions, translations into 10 languages, and selling more than 500,000 copies.

My favorite Sawyer quote:

Complete success would mean that every individual felt,
"I enjoyed the mathematics that I had time to learn.
If I ever need or want to learn some more,
I shall not be afraid to do so."

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DEATHS

1678 - Claude Hardy (1598 in Le Mans, France- 5 April 1678 in Paris, France) was a French lawyer and amateur mathematician who made Latin translations of some of Euclid's work. A translation into French of Viète's book on algebra, originally written in Latin, appeared around 1630 with Antoine Vasset as the translator. It is believed that "Antoine Vasset" was a pseudonym for Claude Hardy. In 1630, under his own name, Hardy published Examen and in 1638 he published Refutation. These works dealt with the problem of the duplication of the cube*SAU

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1684 William Brouncker (1620 – 5 April 1684) He was the King’s nominee and first president of the Royal Society of London (1666–1677). His mathematical work concerned in particular the calculations of the lengths of the parabola and cycloid, and the quadrature of the hyperbola, which requires approximation of the natural logarithm function by infinite series. He was the first European to solve what is now known as Pell's equation. He was the first in England to take interest in generalized continued fractions and, following the work of John Wallis, he provided development in the generalized continued fraction of pi *Wik
In 1656 he gave the continued fraction expansion

. . . and used it to calculate π correct to ten decimal places. *VFR

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1861 Ferdinand Joachimsthal (9 March 1818 in Goldberg, Prussian Silesia (now Złotoryja, Poland) - 5 April 1861 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland)) Influenced by the work of Jacobi, Dirichlet and Steiner, Joachimsthal wrote on the theory of surfaces where he made substantial contributions, particularly to the problem of normals to conic sections and second degree surfaces. *SAU

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1900 Joseph-Louis-François Bertrand (11 Mar 1822; 5 Apr 1900 at age 78) was a French mathematician and educator and educator remembered for his elegant applications of differential equations to analytical mechanics, particularly in thermodynamics, and for his work on statistical probability and the theory of curves and surfaces. In 1845 Bertrand conjectured that there is at least one prime between n and (2n-2) for every n greater than 3, as proved five years later by Chebyshev. It is not clear to me if he was the one who suggested the jingle

I've told you once and I'll tell you again
There's always a prime between n and 2n.

In 1855 he translated Gauss's work on the theory of errors and the method of least squares into French. He wrote a number of notes on the reduction of data from observations. *TIS At age 11 he started to attend classes at the Ecole Polytechnique, where his Uncle Duhamel was a well-known professor of mathematics. At 17 he received his doctor of science degree. *VFR
In combinatorics, Bertrand's ballot problem is the question: "In an election where candidate A receives p votes and candidate B receives q votes with p > q, what is the probability that A will be strictly ahead of B throughout the count?" which Bertrand asked, and proved in 1887 in Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences.
The answer is  

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2004 – Heiner Zieschang (12 November 1936 in Kiel – 5 April 2004) was a German mathematician. He was a professor at Ruhr University in Bochum from 1968 till 2002. He was a topologist. In 1996 he was an honorary doctor of University of Toulouse and in 1997 he was an honorary professor of Moscow State University.

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2009 Irving John ("I.J."; "Jack") Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009) was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After World War II, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester. Good moved to the United States where he was professor at Virginia Tech.
He was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to a Polish-Jewish family in London. He later anglicized his name to Irving John Good and signed his publications "I. J. Good."
An originator of the concept now known as "technological singularity," Good served as consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick, director of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Good's published work ran to over three million words. He was known for his work on Bayesian statistics. He published a number of books on probability theory. In 1958 he published an early version of what later became known as the Fast Fourier Transform but in a journal so obscure that it never became widely known.*Wik

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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