Thursday, 6 August 2020

On This Day in Math - August 6



God exists since mathematics is consistent,
and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it
.
~André Weil


The 219th day of the year; There are 219 space groups in 3 dimensions, analogous to the 17 wallpaper groups in 2 dimensions.

219 p +2 is prime when p is any of the first three primes.

219 is the sum of four cubes (not all distinct).

219 is a Happy Number, the iteration of the sum of the squares of the digits eventually maps to one.

See More Math Facts for every Year Date here




EVENTS

1181 a supernova was observed by Chinese astronomers in the constellation now known as Cassiopeia, and independently found one day later from Japan. The "guest star" remained visible for 185 days (over 6 months). A supernova remnant, 3C58, found by radio astronomers in the 1960's, was first proposed to be the remnant of the supernova 1181 by F. Richard Stephenson. 3C58 is a filled-center supernova remnant, extends now about 9x5 arc minutes and contains a pulsar which rotates about 15 times per second. In addition, an extended X-ray source surrounding the pulsar has been observed, thought to be produced by a cloud of high-energy particles about 20 light years across. *TIS

1456 According to one story that first appeared in a 1475 posthumous biography and was subsequently embellished and popularized by Pierre-Simon Laplace, Callixtus III excommunicated the 1456 apparition of Halley's Comet, believing it to be an ill omen for the Christian defenders of Belgrade from the besieging armies of the Ottoman Empire. No known primary source supports the authenticity of this account. The 29 June 1456 papal bull of Callixtus III calling for a public prayer for the success of the crusade, makes no mention of the comet. By 6 August, when the Turkish siege was broken the comet had not been visible in either Europe or Turkey for several weeks. *Wik

1618 Johannes Kepler determent the distance to the sun to be 22.5 mil km. *NSEC

In 1753, Professor Georg Richmann of St. Petersburg, Moscow, was killed by his experiment with lightning. One year after Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, Richmann attached a wire to the top of his house and led it down to an iron bar suspended above "the electric needle" and a bowl of water partly filled with iron filings*. It was reported that during a storm, Richmann was struck while about a foot from the bar, and closely observing the needle. "A globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches diameter" from the bar struck Richmann's forehead" with "an explosion like that of a small cannon." His assistant, M. Sokolaw, who survived, was thrown to the floor feeling blows on his back. He found marks of burning hot wire fragments on the back of his clothes.*TIS

1855 Thomas Penyngton Kirkman presented a paper on the general question of determining a condition under which a graph is Hamiltonian. Unlike Hamilton, who was primarily
interested in the algebraic connections of one specific graph, Kirkman was interested in the general study of ‘Hamiltonian circuits’ in arbitrary graphs. He was the rector of a small and isolated English parish, but made regular and important contributions to mathematics. His solution of the problem was incorrect; but he did present a second paper in 1856 in which he described a general class of graphs which do not contain such a circuit. Kirkman also studied the existence of Hamiltonian circuits on the dodecahedron, a variation of the Icosian Game which Hamilton also studied. In fact, the two men met once in 1861 when Hamilton visited Kirkman at his rectory. That Hamilton’s name became associated with the circuits, and not Kirkman’s, appears to be one of the accidents of history, or perhaps a credit to the fame of Hamilton’s quarternions and work in mathematical physics. *Janet Barnett, Early Writings on Graph Theory

1945 First atomic bomb explosion over a populated area, Hiroshima, Japan, from the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber. The pilot was Colonel Paul Tibbits, the bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee. *VFR The city was chosen because it had not been bombed and its area was perfect for evaluating the effect of the bomb.

2002 The first Polynomial-time primality test was published. The first provably polynomial time test for primality was invented by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena. The AKS primality test, runs in Õ((log n)12) (improved to Õ((log n)7.5) in the published revision of their paper), which can be further reduced to Õ((log n)6) if the Sophie Germain conjecture is true. Subsequently, Lenstra and Pomerance presented a version of the test which runs in time Õ((log n)6) unconditionally. *Wik

2003 After 61.40 days of computation, a 150-year-old unsolved problem has finally been answered, there is no 8x8 knights tour which forms a magic square. A knight's tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square only once. The earliest known reference to the knight's tour problem dates back to the 9th century AD. In Rudraṭa's Kavyalankara, a Sanskrit work on Poetics. If starting square is labled "one" and each square it lands on is numbered sequentially, an 8x8 number square is formed. If that square is a magic square, then you have formed a magic knights tour (except now we know you can't). It has long been known that magic knight's tours are not possible on n x n boards for n odd. It was also known that such tours are possible for all boards of size 4k x 4k for k > 2.
This longstanding open problem has now been settled in the negative by an exhaustive computer enumeration of all possibilities. The software for the computation was written by J. C. Meyrignac, and the website was established by Guenter Stertenbrink to distribute and collect results for all possible tours. After 61.40 CPU-days, corresponding to 138.25 days of computation at 1 GHz, the project was completed on August 5, 2003. What are the results? In addition to netting a total of 140 distinct semimagic knight's tours, the computation demonstrated for the first time that no 8 x 8 magic knight's tour is possible, thus finally laying this long-open problem to rest. *Mathworld

2011 During the first excavation campaign of the Paphos Agora Project (3rd July – 6th August 2011), an interesting object was discovered. An ancient, two-sided amulet with a 59-letter palindromic inscription. It was translated in the following way: “Yahweh is the bearer of the secret name, the lion of Re secure in his shrine”.
The opposite side of the amulet has several images, including a bandaged mummy (likely representing the Egyptian god Osiris) lying on a boat and an image of Harpocrates, the god of silence, who is shown sitting on a stool while holding his right hand up to his lips. Strangely, the amulet also displays a mythical dog-headed creature called a cynocephalus, which is shown holding a paw up to its lips, as if mimicking Harpocrates' gesture. *livescience

BIRTHS

1638 Nicolas Malebranche(6 August 1638 – 13 October 1715) was a major French philosopher and follower of Descartes whose ideas he developed to bring them more in line with standard Roman Catholic orthodox belief.*SAU

1667 Johann (Jean) I Bernoulli born. ( August 6, 1667– 1 January 1748) was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is known for his contributions to infinitesimal calculus and educated Leonhard Euler in his youth. In 1691 Johann Bernoulli again fueled the tensions between himself and his brother when he solved the problem of the catenary presented by Jakob. In 1696 Johann Bernoulli proposed the problem of the brachistochrone, despite already having solved the problem himself. Within two years he received five answers, one of which was from his older brother, Jacob. Bernoulli also proposed a fluid energy perpetual motion machine.
Bernoulli was hired by Guillaume François Antoine de L'Hôpital to tutor him in mathematics. Bernoulli and L'Hôpital signed a contract which gave L'Hôpital the right to use Bernoulli’s discoveries as he pleased. L'Hôpital authored the first textbook on infinitesimal calculus, "Analyse des Infiniment Petits pour l'Intelligence des Lignes Courbes", which mainly consisted of the work of Bernoulli, including what is now known as L'Hôpital's rule. *Wik

1741 John Wilson (6 August 1741, Applethwaite, Westmorland – 18 October 1793, Kendal, Westmorland) born English laywer and mathematician. The theorem that bears his name [If p is prime, then (p − 1)! ≡−1 (mod p)] was published without proof in Waring’s Meditationes algebraicae of 1770, but we now know that Leibniz knew the result. The first published proof was by Lagrange (1773), who showed that it is equivalent to Fermat’s Little Theorem of 1640: If p is prime and  p divides a Then ap−1 ≡ 1 (mod p).
Euler first proved this in 1736. Lagrange also showed that the converse of Wilson’s Theorem is true. (The converse of Fermat’s is false—the counterexamples are called pseudoprimes.) Sir Frederick Pollack has conjectured that Wilson’s Theorem was a guess that neither he nor Waring could prove. See DeMorgan’s Budget of Paradoxes. *VFR In the 11th century Alhazen (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham )solved problems involving congruences using what is now called Wilson's theorem. In his Opuscula, Alhazen considers the solution of a system of congruences, and gives two general methods of solution. His first method, the canonical method, involved Wilson's theorem, while his second method involved a version of the Chinese remainder theorem.

1766 William Hyde Wollaston (6 August 1766 – 22 December 1828), British Doctor and chemist. He saw in 1802 the Fraunhoferlines in the Solar spectrum but considered it as a limitation of colors. *NSEC
He is also known for discovering two chemical elements and for developing a way to process platinum ore. Wollaston also performed important work in electricity. In 1801, he performed an experiment showing that the electricity from friction was identical to that produced by voltaic piles. *Wik

1838 George James Symons (6 Aug 1838 - 10 Mar 1900) British meteorologist who strove to provide reliable observational data by imposing standards of accuracy and uniformity on meteorological measurements and by substantially increasing the number of reporting stations from 168 to 3,500. He was elected to Royal Meteorological Society (1856) when only 17 years old. He established the British Rainfall Organization (1860) and issued annual rainfall reports (1860-98). Symons's Monthly Meteorological Magazine first appeared in 1866. He wrote hundreds of articles and several books, and he amassed the UK's most comprehensive collection of meteorological books, many of great historical interest.*TIS

1943 Jonathan Bruce Postel (August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who played a pivotal role in creating and administering the Internet. In the late 1960s, Postel was a graduate student developing the ARPANET, a forerunner of the Internet for use by the U.S. Dept. of Defense. As director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which he formed, Postel was a creator of the Internet's address system. The Internet grew rapidly in the 1990s, and there was concern about its lack of regulation. Shortly before his death, Postel submitted a proposal to the U.S. government for an international nonprofit organization that would oversee the Internet and its assigned names and numbers. He died at age 55, from complications after heart surgery.*TIS



DEATHS

1694 Antoine Arnauld was a French supporter of Jansen who published some important works on logic and philosphy. *SAU

1879 Johann Von Lamont (December 13, 1805; Corriemulzie, Scotland - August 6, 1879 Munich, Germany) Scottish-born German astronomer noted for discovering (1852) that the magnetic field of the Earth fluctuates with a 10.3-year activity cycle, but does not correlate it with the period of the sunspot cycle. From 1 Aug 1840, Johann von Lamont (as director of the Royal Astronomical Observatory in Munich) started regular and permanent observations of the earth's magnetic field. In the 1850's he started making regional magnetic surveys in the kingdom of Bavaria, later extended to other states in south Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Prussia and Denmark. His central European maps with isolines of geomagnetic elements, reduced to 1854, were the first worldwide*TIS

1925 Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro (12 January 1853 – 6 August 1925) Much of Ricci-Curbastro's work ... was done jointly with his student Levi-Civita. In a fundamental joint paper that year Méthodes de calcul différentiel absolu et leurs applications he used (for the only time) the name Ricci instead of his full name. This paper had been requested five years earlier by Klein. The authors state their aims in the preface to their important seventy-seven page paper:-
The algorithm of absolute differential calculus, the instrument matériel of the methods ... can be found complete in a remark due to Christoffel. But the methods themselves and the advantages they offer have their raison d'être and their source in the intimate relationships that join them to the notion of an n-dimensional variety, which we owe to the brilliant minds of Gauss and Riemann. ... Being thus associated in an essential way with Vn, it is the natural instrument of all those studies that have as their subject, such a variety, or in which one encounters as a characteristic element a positive quadratic form of the differentials of n variables or of their derivatives.
In the paper, applications are given by Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita to the classification of the quadratic forms of differentials and there are other analytic applications; they give applications to geometry including the theory of surfaces and groups of motions; and mechanical applications including dynamics and solutions to Lagrange's equations. The main ideas of this paper are discussed in. Ricci-Curbastro's absolute differential calculus became the foundation of tensor analysis and was used by Einstein in his theory of general relativity. *SAU

1945 Paul Koebe; (February 15, 1882, Luckenwalde, Brandenburg – August 6, 1945) Koebe's work was all on complex functions, his most important results being on the uniformisation of Riemann surfaces. Shortly after 1900 Koebe established the general principle of uniformisation which had been originally conceived by Klein and Poincaré. Koebe's proof of the uniformisation theorem has been described as: ... arguably one of the great theorems of the century. *SAU

1998 André Weil (6 May 1906 – 6 August 1998) was a French mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry and number theory.*SAU ..renowned for the breadth and quality of his research output, its influence on future work, and the elegance of his exposition. He is especially known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was a founding member and the de facto early leader of the influential Bourbaki group. The philosopher Simone Weil was his sister.*Wik
To avoid the draft, he went to Finland. ''As a soldier,'' he said, ''I would be entirely useless, but as a mathematician I could be of some use.'' The Finns returned him to the French, who imprisoned him for six months. In prison, he created the Riemann hypothesis -- named for a German mathematician -- which became a basic element of number theory and is regarded as one of his most insightful mathematical achievements, Dr. Phillips said.

2002 Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 – August 6, 2002)was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000. Among his contributions to computer science are the shortest path-algorithm, also known as Dijkstra's algorithm; Reverse Polish Notation and related Shunting yard algorithm; the THE multiprogramming system, an important early example of structuring a system as a set of layers; Banker's algorithm; and the semaphore construct for coordinating multiple processors and programs. Another concept due to Dijkstra in the field of distributed computing is that of self-stabilization – an alternative way to ensure the reliability of the system. Dijkstra's algorithm is used in SPF, Shortest Path First, which is used in the routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. *Wik

2007 Atle Selberg (14 June 1917 – 6 August 2007) was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory, and in the theory of automorphic forms, in particular bringing them into relation with spectral theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950.*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

Wednesday, 5 August 2020

On This Day in Math - August 5



Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young,
not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state. 
~Plato

On non-leap years, this is the 217th day of the year; 217 is both the sum of two positive cubes and the difference of two positive consecutive cubes in exactly one way: 217 = 63 + 13 = 93 − 83. (How frequently would the difference of two consecutive cubes also be expressible as the sum of two cubes?)

on leap years this is the 218th day of the year; 218 = 72 + 132

218 is the number of nonequivalent ways to color the 12 edges of a cube using at most 2 colors, where two colorings are equivalent if they differ only by a rotation of the cube.

218 is the smallest number with a Merten funtion =3. (an acceptable definition for students is that the Merten number for n, M(n), is the count of square-free integers up to n that have an even number of prime factors, minus the count of those that have an odd number.) The function is named in honor of Franz Merten, who was a teacher of Schrodinger.
More Math Facts for every Year Day here

EVENTS

1638 One of the early reports on hurricanes came from John Taylor, domestic adventurer, poet, propagandist, Royalist, and sometime overseer of the Company of Watermen in London. In 1638 he seems to have published New and Strange News from St. Christophers, of a tempestuous Spirit, which is called by the Indians a Hurry Cano, which happeneth in many of those Islands of America, or the West-Indies, as it did in August last the 5. 1638. Blowing downe houses, tearing up trees by the rootes, and it did puffe men up from the earth, as they had beene Feathers, killing divers men. *PACHS blog

1775 Montucla, who was the anonymous editor, served as Royal Censur for a new edition of Jacques Ozanam’s book on mathematical recreations (the first edition was written in Ozanam’s spare time during war time and published in 1694). *VFR The book was later published in English by Charles Hutton in 1803.

1766 Eclipse observed southeast of Newfoundland: Eclipse Island (part of Burgeo Islands). Mentioned in the Chronology of Captains James Cooks (1728-1779) travels by Paul Capper. *NSEC

In 1864, Giovanni Batista Donati (1827-73) made the first spectroscopic observations of a comet tail (from the small comet, Tempel, 1864 II). At a distance from the Sun the spectrum of a comet is identical to that of the Sun, and its visibility is due only to reflected sunlight. Donati showed that comet tail formed close to the Sun contains luminous gas. In the spectrum of light from the comet tail, Donati saw three absorption lines bands superimposed on a continuous spectrum, which he named alpha, beta and gamma, and are now known as the Swan bands. These bands were also seen in a comet tail viewed by Pietro Secchi in 1866. Sir William Huggins (1868) identified that these were due to the presence of carbon (molecular carbon, C2).*TIS

1935 Institute of Mathematical Statistics founded.*VFR The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts of the world. Beginning in 2005, the institute started offering joint membership with the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability as well as with the International Statistical Institute.

1962 a lunar occultation on August 5 enabled Australian radio astronomers to more precisely fix the location of the previously known radio source 3C 273, in Virgo. In 1963 this became the first member of a new class of object eventually to be called quasars or "quasi-stellar radio sources." Maarten Schmidt, using the Hale optical telescope, saw it as a faint star-like object with a visible jet. Its spectrum featured unusual emission lines, which he identified as ordinary hydrogen lines shifted toward longer wavelengths (redshifted) by 16%. If the shift is due to velocity, it is moving away at one-sixth the speed of light and one of the most distant objects visible. Quasars radiate as much energy per second as a hundred or more galaxies. 3C273 is the brightest quasar known.*TIS

1977 Fermilab announces the discovery of what would come to be known as the Bottom Quark. In the summer of 1977, a team of physicists, led by Leon M. Lederman, working on experiment 288 in the proton center beam line of the Fermilab fixed target areas discovered the Upsilon. This discovery was eventually understood as being the bound state of the bottom quark and its antiquark. Their data was confirmed in experiments conducted in 1978 *Fermilab History and Archives Projec See the announcement here .

1982 Cook 3061 (1982 UB1): Minor planet discovered October 21, 1982 by E. Bowe II at Anderson Mesa. Named for James Cook (1728-1779), British circumnavigator and one of the first scientific navigators. He observed the Solar Eclipse of 1766 August 5 from Newfoundland and in 1769 measured the transit of Venus from Tahiti. Named proposed by the discoverer.*NSEC



BIRTHS

1798 John Wrottesley, 2nd Baron Wrottesley, (5 August 1798 – 27 October 1867) was an English astronomer, who published Catalogue Of The RA Of 1318 Stars. He was a founder member of the Royal Astronomical Society. From his first Observatory in Blackheath, London, he recorded over 12,000 observations. After he inherited the title and the Staffordshire family estate at Wrottesley in 1841, he built an observatory there. In 1855, the city of Wolverhampton nearby decreed that if any ... furnace chimney ...was built ... within three miles of the observatory, it shall be constructed on the best and approved principles "for consuming the smoke arising ... therefrom". This of course was so that observations from the observatory would not be hampered by smoke pollution.*TIS

1802 Neils Henrik Abel (5 August 1802 – 6 April 1829) 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."

1855 William Henry Dines (5 August 1855 – 24 December 1927) was an English meterologist and inventor of related measurement instruments such as the Dines pressure tube anemometer (the first instrument to measure both the velocity and direction of wind, 1901), a very lightweight meteorograph, and a radiometer (1920). He joined the Royal Meteorological Society study of the cause of the disastrous Tay Bridge collapse of 1879. His measurements of upper air conditions, first with kites and later by balloon ascents (1907), brought an understanding of cyclones from dynamic processes in the lower stratosphere rather than thermal effects nearer to the ground.*TIS

1855  Alfredo Capelli (5 Aug 1855, Milan, Italy – 28 Jan 1910, Naples, Italy) was an Italian mathematician who discovered Capelli's identity.
Capelli graduated from the University of Rome in 1877, and moved to the University of Pavia where he worked as an assistant for Felice Casorati. In 1881 he became a professor at the University of Palermo, replacing Cesare Arzelà who had recently moved to Bologna. In 1886, he moved again to the University of Naples, where he held the chair in algebra. He remained at Naples until his death in 1910. As well as being a professor there, he was editor of the Giornale di Matematiche di Battaglini from 1894 to 1910, and was elected to the Accademia dei Lincei.*Wik

1930 Neil Alden Armstrong, (August 5, 1930, August 25, 2012) U.S. astronaut, was the first man to walk on the moon (20 Jul 1969, Apollo 11). He served as a Navy pilot during the Korean War, then joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (which became NASA), as a civilian test pilot. In 1962, he was the first civilian to enter the astronaut-training program. He gained experience as command pilot of the Gemini 8 mission, which accomplished the first physical joining of two orbiting spacecraft. Later he was commander of the Apollo 11 lunar mission. From 1971, he worked as professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the commission that investigated the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster.*TIS Armstrong died following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures. *Mercury News

1946 Shirley Ann Jackson (August 5, 1946; Washington D.C. - ) is an American physicist, and the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973, becoming the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT in nuclear physics.
Jackson joined the Theoretical Physics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1976, examining the fundamental properties of various materials. She began her time at Bell Labs by studying materials to be used in the semiconductor industry. In 1978, Jackson became part of the Scattering and Low Energy Physics Research Department, and in 1988 she moved to the Solid State and Quantum Physics Research Department. At Bell Labs, Jackson researched the optical and electronic properties of two-dimensional and quasi-two dimensional systems. In her research, Jackson has made contributions to the knowledge of charged density waves in layered compounds, polaronic aspects of electrons in the surface of liquid helium films, and optical and electronic properties of semiconductor strained-layer superlattices. On these topics and others she has prepared or collaborated on over 100 scientific articles.
Jackson served on the faculty at Rutgers University in Piscataway and New Brunswick, New Jersey from 1991 to 1995, in addition to continuing to consult with Bell Labs on semiconductor theory. Her research during this time focused on the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional systems.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed Jackson to serve as Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), becoming the first woman and first African American to hold that position.*Wik

DEATHS

1729 Thomas Newcomen (shortly before 24 February 1664 – 5 August 1729) inventor of the atmospheric steam engine, died in London. His invention of c.1711 came into use to pump water out of coal mines by 1725. It had a piston connected to one end of a large crossbeam; the other end was connected to a very heavy pump piston. On each stroke, water chilled and condensed the steam in the cylinder, dropping the piston thus moving the crossbeam and operating the pump. This was wasteful of fuel needed to reheat the cylinder for the next stroke. Although it was slow and inefficient, Newcomen's engine was relied on for the first 60 years of the new steam age it began. *TIS

1853 Théodore Olivier (21 Jan 1793 in France - 5 Aug 1853 in France) From the 1840's Olivier wrote textbooks. His greatest fame, however, is as a result of the mathematical models which he created to assist in his teaching of geometry. Some of the models were of ruled surfaces, with moving parts to illustrate to students how the ruled surfaces were generated. Others were designed to illustrate the curves of intersection of certain surfaces. In fact Olivier earned quite a good income from selling these models, particularly in the United States.
The United States Military Academy at West Point had 23 mathematical models made for them by Olivier to use as teaching aids.
These models are built on wooden boxes as bases, have metal supports, and consist of strings suspended from movable arms and arranged to form a variety of geometrical figures. The strings are held in place by lead weights that are concealed by the bases. The models illustrate such things as the intersection of two half cones, the intersection of a plane, hyperbolic paraboloid and a hyperboloid of one sheet, and the intersection of two half cylinders.
Other institutions in the United States such as the Columbia School of Mines also purchased models from Olivier while Princeton had copies of Olivier's models made for them. In 1849 Olivier presented a full set of the range of models he had created to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. The models had been manufactured by the firm of Pixii, Père et Fils, and later by the firm of Fabre de Lagrange which took over their manufacture. In 1857, four years after Olivier died, Harvard University purchased 24 of Olivier's models from Fabre de Lagrange and after the university received the order Benjamin Peirce gave a series of lectures on the mathematics which they illustrated. These models are still in Harvard's collection of scientific instruments.
Even after giving a complete set of his models to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, forty models were still in Olivier's possession at the time of his death. These were sold in 1869 to William Gillispie from Union College in Schenectady, east-central New York, United States. Gillispie exhibited the models at Union College which was appropriate since, twenty years earlier, Union College had became one of the first liberal arts colleges in the United States to give engineering courses. When Gillispie died Olivier's models were sold to the college. *SAU

1872 Charles-Eugène Delaunay (9 April 1816 – 5 August 1872) French mathematician and astronomer whose theory of lunar motion advanced the development of planetary-motion theories. After 20 years of work, he published two volumes on lunar theory, La Théorie du mouvement de la lune (1860,1867). This is an important case of the three body problem. Delaunay found the longitude, latitude and parallax of the Moon as infinite series. These gave results correct to 1 second of arc but were not too practical as the series converged slowly. However this work was important in the beginnings of functional analysis. Delaunay succeeded Le Verrier as director of the Paris Observatory in 1870 but two years later he and three companions drowned in a boating accident.*TIS

1910 Julius Petersen was a Danish mathematician who worked on geometry and graph theory. He is best remembered for the Petersen graph. *SAU  In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Petersen graph is an undirected graph with 10 vertices and 15 edges. It is a small graph that serves as a useful example and counterexample for many problems in graph theory. The Petersen graph is named for Julius Petersen, who in 1898 constructed it to be the smallest bridgeless cubic graph with no three-edge-coloring. Although the graph is generally credited to Petersen, it had in fact first appeared 12 years earlier, in a paper by A. B. Kempe (1886). Donald Knuth states that the Petersen graph is "a remarkable configuration that serves as a counterexample to many optimistic predictions about what might be true for graphs in general."  *Wik

1981 Jerzy Neyman, (April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981) in a paper with his long-time friend and colleague Elizabeth Scott, wrote:
Each morning before breakfast every single one of us approaches an urn filled with white and black balls. We draw a ball. If it is white, we survive the day. If it is black, we die. The proportion of black balls in the urn is not the same for each day, but grows as we become older ... Still there are always some white balls present, and some of us continue to draw them day after day for many years.
On this date, Neyman, age 87, drew a black ball. As he wished of many of his friends, “May the earth rest lightly on him.” [From a review, by Robert V. Hogg, of Neyman—From Life, by Constance Reid (Springer, 1983), in the The College Mathematics Journal, 15(1984), 82–84]*VFR
Neyman was a Russian-American mathematician who was one of the principal architects of modern theoretical statistics. His papers on hypothesis testing (1928-33) helped establish the subject. During 1934-38, he gave a theory of confidence intervals (important in the analysis of data); extended statistical theory to contagious distributions, (for interpretation of biological data); wrote on sampling stratified populations (which led to such applications as the Gallup Poll); and developed the model for randomised experiments (widely relevant across the fields of science, including agriculture, biology, medicine, and physical sciences). His later research applied statistics to meteorology and medicine. In 1968 he was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science.*TIS

1985 Mary P. Dolciani Halloran, noted writer of several High School texts, of Hunter College died at the age of 62. The MAA book series Dolciani Mathematical Expositions is named in her honor. *VFR



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

Tuesday, 4 August 2020

On This Day in Math - August 4



AccurateTheorem – via late Latin from Greek theōrēma ‘speculation, proposition’, from theōrein ‘look at’, from theōros ‘spectator’. It is a non-intuitive statement that has been proven to be true using previously established theorems or statements such as axioms. Popular quote: “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems” most likely from Alfred Renyi, probably talking about Paul Erdos and his love for coffee.

reckoning: the entrance into knowledge of all existing things and all obscure secrets.

Ahmes the Scribe, Quoted in A B Chase, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (Reston Va. 1967)

This is the 217th day of the year; 217 is both the sum of two positive cubes and the difference of two positive consecutive cubes in exactly one way: 217 = 63 + 13 = 93 − 83. (How frequently would the difference of two consecutive cubes also be expressible as the sum of two cubes?)

217 is a palindrome in base six, (1001) and in base 12, (161).

Anti-sigma(n) is not a well known function, but anti-sigma(22) = 217.  Simply add all the numbers from one to 22, then subtract all the numbers that divide into 22 evenly: [ (22*23)/2 - 1 - 2 - 11 - 22 = 217 ]



EVENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



BIRTHS

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

1950 Jacqueline Anne ( Barton)Stedall (4 August 1950; Romford, Essex, U.K.–27 September 2014; Painswick, Gloucestershire) was a well-known historian of mathematics. Although her career as a researcher, scholar and university teacher lasted less than 14 years, it was greatly influential. Her nine books, more than 20 articles, input to the online edition of the manuscripts of Thomas Harriot, journal editorships and contributions to Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 programme In Our Time showed her exceptional breadth of scholarship.
Jackie Stedall came to Oxford in October 2000 as Clifford-Norton Student in the History of Science at Queen’s College. She held degrees of BA (later MA) in Mathematics from Cambridge University (1972), MSc in Statistics from the University of Kent (1973), and PhD in History of Mathematics from the Open University (2000). She also had a PGCE in Mathematics (Bristol Polytechnic 1991). In due course she became Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Mathematical Institute and at Queen’s College, posts from which, knowing that she was suffering from incurable cancer, she took early retirement in December 2013.
This was her fifth career. Following her studies at Cambridge and Canterbury she had been three years a statistician, four years Overseas Programmes Administrator for War on Want, seven years a full-time parent, and eight years a schoolteacher before she became an academic. *Obituaries at The Guardian, Oxford Mathemtics, and Wik



DEATHS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

Monday, 3 August 2020

On This Day in Math - August 3

1935 Little Orphan Annie Decoder

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

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

216 is also the sum of a twin prime pair (107 + 109).

And for those who are interested in variations on 666, the so called number of the beast, \( 6^{(6^6)} =216 \) mod 360
from which we get the divine equivalent, \( cos(216)^o= \frac{- \phi}{2} \)

Ok, one more 216 to 666 connection from Ben Vitalle. There is a right triangle with legs of 216, 630 and a hypotenuse of (wait for it...... ) 666 Benjamin Vitale ‏@BenVitale
See More Math Facts for every Year Day here


EVENTS

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

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

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

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

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

1823 German chemist Johann Dobereiner discovered the role of platinum (Pt) as a catalyst. He realized that a platinum (Pt) sponge could cause the ignition of hydrogen (H) at room temperature by lowering the activation energy. This effect was the precursor to the theory of catalysis, but it was not until 1835 that the term “catalyst” was coined by Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius. *rsc.org

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

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

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

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

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

2018 Italy issues new stamp honoring Maria Gaetana Agnesi. It is one of four stamps honoring Italian women of learning, "Excellencies of the knowledge - Italian female genius"


BIRTHS


1805 William Rowan Hamilton born. The date on his tombstone is 4 August 1805, the confusion being due to the fact that he was born at midnight.*VFR 
Sir William Rowan Hamilton (3 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, who made important contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra. His studies of mechanical and optical systems led him to discover new mathematical concepts and techniques. His greatest contribution is perhaps the reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In mathematics, he is perhaps best known as the inventor of quaternions. Hamilton is said to have shown immense talent at a very early age, prompting astronomer Bishop Dr. John Brinkley to remark in 1823 of Hamilton at the age of 18: “This young man, I do not say will be, but is, the first mathematician of his age.”
William Rowan Hamilton's scientific career included the study of geometrical optics, classical mechanics, adaptation of dynamic methods in optical systems, applying quaternion and vector methods to problems in mechanics and in geometry, development of theories of conjugate algebraic couple functions (in which complex numbers are constructed as ordered pairs of real numbers), solvability of polynomial equations and general quintic polynomial solvable by radicals, the analysis on Fluctuating Functions (and the ideas from Fourier analysis), linear operators on quaternions and proving a result for linear operators on the space of quaternions (which is a special case of the general theorem which today is known as the Cayley–Hamilton theorem). Hamilton also invented "Icosian Calculus", which he used to investigate closed edge paths on a dodecahedron that visit each vertex exactly once. *Wik

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

1918 Artemas Martin (August 3, 1835; Steuben County, New York - November 7, 1918; Washington, DC, United States) was a self-educated American mathematician.
Martin grew up in Venango County, Pennsylvania. He was home-schooled until the age of 14, when he began studying mathematics at the local school, later moving to the Franklin Select School a few miles away and then to the Franklin Academy, finishing his formal education at age approximately 20. He worked as a farmer, oil driller, and schoolteacher.
Martin was a prolific contributor of problems and solutions to mathematical puzzle columns in popular magazines beginning at the age of 18 in the Pittsburgh Almanac and the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. From 1870 to 1875, he was editor of the "Stairway Department" of Clark's School Visitor, one of the magazines to which he had previously contributed. From 1875 to 1876 Martin moved to the Normal Monthly, where he published 16 articles on diophantine analysis. He subsequently became editor of the Mathematical Visitor in 1877 and of the Mathematical Magazine in 1882.
In 1881, he declined an invitation to become a professor of mathematics at the Normal School in Missouri. (This was probably from the work of Prof E B Seitz, who had just been appointed professor at the Missouri Normal School in Kirksville. Martin had contacted Seitz, then a teacher in Greenville, Ohio and had contributed a solution to a difficult problem on averages in the "Stairway" department of the Schoolday Magazine, for which Martin was an editor. They continued to communicate for the rest of Seitz brief life)In 1885, he became the librarian for the Survey Office of the United States Coast Guard, and in 1898 he became a computer in the Division of Tides.
In 1877 Martin was given an honorary M.A. from Yale University. In 1882 he was awarded another honorary degree, a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and his third honorary degree, an LL.D., was given to him in 1885 by Hillsdale College. He was elected to the London Mathematical Society in 1878, the Société Mathématique de France in 1884, the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in 1885, the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1886, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1890, and the New York Mathematical Society in 1891. He was also a member of the American Mathematical Society, the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, the Mathematical Association of England, and the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung.
He died on November 7, 1918.
Martin maintained an extensive mathematical library, now in the collections of American University. *Wik (He was also a very early writer on "pursuit" curves. PB)

1851 George Francis FitzGerald (3 August 1851 – 22 February 1901) Irish physicist whose suggestion of a way to produce waves helped lay a foundation for wireless telegraphy. He also first developed a theory, independently discovered by Hendrik Lorentz, that a material object moving through an electromagnetic field would exhibit a contraction of its length in the direction of motion. This is now known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, which Einstein used in his own special theory of relativity. He also was first to propose the structure of comets as a head made of large stones, but a tail make of such smaller stones (less than 1-cm diam.) that the pressure of light radiation from the sun could deflect them. FitzGerald also studied electrolysis as well as electromagnetic radiation.*TIS
FitzGerald was the nephew of George Johnstone Stoney, the Irish physicist who coined the term "electron". After the particles were discovered by J. J. Thomson and Walter Kaufmann in 1896, FitzGerald was the one to propose calling them electrons. *Wik

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

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


DEATHS

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

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

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


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