On This Day in Math - May 11

A mind which has a taste for scientific inquiry,and has learned the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur,has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations.

~John Herschel

The 131st day of the year; 131 is the sum of three two-digit primes (31 + 41 + 59) whose concatenation is the decimal expansion of first six digits of pi (3.14159...).

Any ordering of the digits of 131 is still prime. This is called an "absolute" prime.

131 is the sum of three prime numbers that all begin with the same digit. *Prime Curios

bonus: 131 is the 32nd prime and the sum of the digits of both numbers is 5. 32 & 131 is the smallest n, P(n) pair with this property. Such numbers are often called Honaker Primes after G. L. Honaker, Jr, from Prime Curios.  There is only one more such prime that is a  year day.

The reciprocal of 131 repeats with a period of 130 digits, 1/131 =0.007633587786259
54198473282442748091603053435114503816793893129770992366412213740458
015267175572519083969465648854961832...

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EVENTS

1892 Edgeworth’s first Newmarch lecture. In May and June of 1892 Edgeworth, newly appointed to the Oxford chair and editor of The Economic Journal, gave six Newmarch lectures, "On the Uses and Methods of Statistics."

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1894 The Mississippi Weather Almanac lists this date as the date of the "most unusual weather event in the states history." In the little town of Bovina, just a short run from Vicksburg (Grant had his Army make Bovina a field hospital during the siege of Vicksburg) during a hail storm a 6" by 8" gopher turtle fell from the sky encased in ice. (admit it, you just don't find that kind of fascinating science information on your typical blog) * "Queen of the Turtle Derby" by Julia Reed.

According to  Wikipedia, "The gopher tortoise is a representative of the genus Gopherus, which contains the only tortoises native to North America.  

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1897 black American inventor, William U. Moody was issued a U.S. design patent for a “game board design.” . It shows a rectangular board with a particular arrangement of partitions in the form of arcs of concentric circles and some other shorter partitions causing a complex route for a ball to travel from one corner to the diagonal corner, presumably, by tilting the board. *TIS
This was one of a number of variants of the most popular maze game of the period. Charles Martin Crandall produced many popular toys from his plant in Pennsylvania, and his "Pigs in Clover", release in 1889, captured the nation in a frenzy. The New York Tribune's March 13, 1889 issue reported Senator William M. Evarts purchased one from a street fakir in order to get rid of him. He took the puzzle home and worked it for hours. The following morning he brought it with him into senate chambers where Senator George Graham Vest stopped by Evarts' desk, borrowed the puzzle and took it to a cloak room. Soon thereafter he was joined by Senators James L. Pugh, James B. Eustis, Edward C. Walthall and John E. Kenna. A page was sent out to buy five of the puzzles and upon his return, the group engaged in a "pig driving contest". About 30 minutes later, Senator Vest announced his accomplishment of driving the last pig in the pen. A few days later a political cartoon in the New York World's March 17, 1889 issue lampooned President Benjamin Harrison's advisors and cabinet members showing the group sitting around playing the game. The caption read "Will Mr. Harrison be able to get all these hungry pigs in the official pen?"

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1905 Albert Einstein's paper, "On the motion of small particles suspended in liquids at rest required by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat." (Brownian motion paper) is received by Annalen der Physik, .
"In this paper Einstein reports that the kinetic theory of heat predicts that small particles suspended in water must execute a random motion visible under the microscope. He suspects this motion is Brownian motion but has insufficient datato affirm it. The prediction is a powerful test of the truth of the kinetic theory of heat. A failure to observe the effect would refute the theory. If it is seen and measured, it provides a way to estimate Avogadro's number. The domain in which the effect is observed is one in which the second law of thermodynamics no longer holds, a disturbing result for the energeticists of the time. "  * John D. Norton, Einstein, 1905 Pitt.edu

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1920 Oxford University passed a statute admitting women to degrees. *VFR

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1928 radio station WGY, in Schenectady, NY, began America’s first regularly scheduled TV broadcasts. The programs lasted from 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Most of the viewers were on the technical staff at nearby General Electric, which had designed the system and was using the broadcasts to refine its equipment. A handful of hobbyists who had built their own sets were also able to watch. Those who tuned in had to make constant adjustments, turning two knobs at once to keep the blurry picture discernible on their three-inch-square screens. By the end of 1928, 17 more stations around the country began scheduled broadcasts, designed to test the apparatus rather than attract viewers. *TIS

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1940 At the 1940 New York World's Fair Westinghouse displayed a machine, the Nimatron, that played Nim. From May 11, 1940, to October 27, 1940, only a few people were able to beat the machine in that six-week period; if they did, they were presented with a coin that said Nim Champ. It was also one of the first-ever electronic computerized games.

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1951, Jay Forrester patented computer core memory.

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1957 Howard F. Fehr, of Columbia University Teachers College, in an address at Syracuse: “A mathematics professor who talks at length affects both ends of the listener—he makes one end feel numb and the other feel dumb.” [Eves, Revisited, p. 151] . *VFR

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1959 Eugene P. Wigner delivered a penetrating Courant Lecture at NYU on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” which is well worth reading. *VFR

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1979 VisiCalc Introduced. It was the first program operable by inexperienced computer users. As it ran only on the Apple, the company soon was on top of the market. *VFR

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1986 A specially designed bicycle set the human powered land speed record of 105.37 km per hour (65.48 miles per hour). *VFR

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1997 Garry Kasparov loses in the rematch with IBM's Deep Blue in the first match of what many considered a test of artificial intelligence. The world's best chess player, Kasparov lost the match and $1.1 million purse to the IBM supercomputer, which he had claimed could never surpass human chess ability. After losing the sixth and final game of the match, Kasparov accused IBM of building a machine specifically to beat him. Observers said he was frustrated by Deep Blue's quickness although they expected him to win with unconventional moves. *CHM On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). The match concluded on February 17, 1996.
Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on May 11. *Wik

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BIRTHS

1702 Isaac Greenwood. (11 May 1702 Boston, Massachusetts – 22 October 1745 Charleston, South Carolina ) In 1727 he was installed at Harvard as the first Hollis professor of mathematics and natural and experimental philosophy. He strengthened and modernized the science program at Harvard. *VFR
During his tenure, he wrote anonymously the first natively-published American book on mathematics – the Greenwood Book, published in 1729. This book made the first published statement of the short scale value for billion in the United States, which eventually became the value used in most English-speaking countries.
He was removed from the Chair for intemperance (drunkenness) in 1737.
Unable to support his family, he joined the Royal Navy as a chaplain – HMS Rose in 1742, and later HMS Aldborough in 1744. He was released from service in Charleston, South Carolina, on 22 May 1745.
He drank himself to death a few months later on 22 October 1745.*Wik

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1871 Frank Schlesinger (May 11, 1871 New York City – July 10, 1943 Old Lyme, Connecticut) American astronomer who pioneered in the use of photography to map stellar positions and to measure stellar parallaxes, which could give more precise determinations of distance than visual ones, and with less than one hundredth as much time at the telescope. He designed instruments and mathematical and numerical techniques to improve parallax measurements. He published ten volumes of zone catalogs, including some 150,000 stars. He compiled positions, magnitudes, proper motions, radial velocities, and other data to produce the first edition and, with Louise Jenkins, the second, of the widely-used Bright Star Catalogues, making Yale a leading institution in astrometry. He established a second Yale observatory in South Africa. *VFR

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1881 Theodore von Karman (May 11, 1881 – May 7, 1963) Hungarian-American aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization.*Wik; He was director of the Institute for Aerodynamics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) in AACHEN, Nordrhein-Westfalen, in 1913-1934. The main lecture theatre complex is named the Kármán Auditorium and there is a photo and a bust of him in the foyer.

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1924 Eugene Borisovich Dynkin ( May 11, 1924 — 14 November 2014) was a Soviet and American mathematician. He has made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes. The Dynkin diagram, the Dynkin system, and Dynkin's lemma are named for him.
In 1968, Dynkin was forced to transfer from the Moscow University to the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He worked there on the theory of economic growth and economic equilibrium. He remained at the Institute until 1976, when he emigrated to the United States. In 1977, he became a professor at Cornell University, where he died in 2014. *Wik

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1918 Richard Phillips Feynman (11 May, 1918 – 15 February, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era. By age 15, he had mastered calculus. He took every physics course at MIT. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1942, he went to Los Alamos where Hans Bethe made the 24 year old Feynman a group leader in the theoretical division, to work on estimating how much uranium would be needed to achieve critical mass for the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. After the war, he developed Feynman Diagrams, a simple notation to describe the complex behavior of subatomic particles. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics. *TIS

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1930 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

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DEATHS

1610 Matteo Ricci (October 6, 1552; Macerata – May 11, 1610;Beijing )was an Italian Jesuit who went to China as a missionary and introduced the Chinese to Western mathematics.*SAU
There is now a memorial plaque in Zhaoqing to commemorate Ricci's six-year stay there, as well as a "Ricci Memorial Centre", in a building dating from the 1860's. *Wik

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1686 Otto von Guericke (originally spelled Gericke) (November 20, 1602 – May 11, 1686 (Julian calendar); November 30, 1602 – May 21, 1686 (Gregorian calendar)) was a German scientist, inventor, and politician. He is best remembered for his invention of the Magdeburg hemispheres, popularized in the writings of Caspar Schott. His major scientific achievements were the establishment of the physics of vacuums, the discovery of an experimental method for clearly demonstrating electrostatic repulsion, and his advocacy of the reality of "action at a distance" and of "absolute space". *Wik

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1871 1st Baronet) Sir John (Frederick William) Herschel (7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English astronomer. As successor to his father, Sir William Herschel, he discovered another 525 nebulae and clusters. John Herschel was a pioneer in celestial photography, and as a chemist contributed to the development of sensitized photographic paper (independently of Talbot). In 1819, he discovered that sodium thiosulphate dissolved silver salts, as used in developing photographs. He introduced the terms positive image and negative image. Being diverse in his research, he also studied physical and geometrical optics, birefringence of crystals, spectrum analysis, and the interference of light and sound waves. To compare the brightness of stars, he invented the astrometer.*TIS [He was buried in Westminster Abbey.]

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1957 Théophile Ernest de Donder (19 August 1872 – 11 May 1957) was a Belgian mathematician and physicist famous for his 1923 work in developing correlations between the Newtonian concept of chemical affinity and the Gibbsian concept of free energy.
He received his doctorate in physics and mathematics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1899, for a thesis entitled Sur la Théorie des Invariants Intégraux (On the Theory of Integral Invariants).
He was professor between 1911 and 1942, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Initially he continued the work of Henri Poincaré and Élie Cartan. As from 1914 he was influenced by the work of Albert Einstein and was an enthusiastic proponent of the theory of relativity. He gained significant reputation in 1923, when he developed his definition of chemical affinity. He pointed out a connection between the chemical affinity and the Gibbs free energy.
He is considered the father of thermodynamics of irreversible processes. De Donder’s work was later developed further by Ilya Prigogine. De Donder was an associate and friend of Albert Einstein. *Wik

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1965 Jason John Nassau (29 March 1893 in Smyrna, (now Izmir) Turkey - 11 May 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA) was an American astronomer.
He performed his doctoral studies at Syracuse, and gained his Ph.D. mathematics in 1920. (His thesis was Some Theorems in Alternants.) He then became an assistant professor at the Case Institute of Technology in 1921, teaching astronomy. He continued to instruct at that institution, becoming the University's first chair of astronomy from 1924 until 1959 and chairman of the graduate division from 1936 until 1940. After 1959 he was professor emeritus.
From 1924 until 1959 he was also the director of the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Warner and Swasey Observatory in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a pioneer in the study of galactic structure. He also discovered a new star cluster, co-discovered 2 novae in 1961, and developed a technique of studying the distribution of red (M-class or cooler) stars.*Wik

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2012 Fritz Joseph Ursell FRS (28 April 1923 – 11 May 2012) was a British mathematician noted for his contributions to fluid mechanics, especially in the area of wave-structure interactions. He held the Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester from 1961–1990, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972 and retired in 1990.
Ursell came to England as a refugee in 1937 from Germany. From 1941 to 1943 he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a bachelor degree in mathematics. *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 - May 10

Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis.

~Augustin Fresnel 

The 130th day of the year; 130 is the sum of the factorials of the first five terms of the Fibonacci sequence.
Did you know that any four terms of the Fibonacci sequence will give you a Pythagorean triangle? If we use 3, 5, 8, 13 you can get 3+13 = 39, 2*5*8 = 80, and 3*8 + 5 * 13 = 89, and {39, 80, 89} is a Pythagorean Right triangle with an area of 1560 (which is 3 * 5 * 8 * 13) Which makes it a Heronian triangle. First observed by Charles W. Raine in 1948. For more on this Pythagonacci connection. 

130 is the sum of the squares of the divisors of 10, ( \( 1^2 + 2^2 + 5^2 + 10^2 = 130 \)
130 is also the only number equal to the sum of the squares of its first 4 divisors: 130 = 1^2 + 2^2 + 5^2 + 10^2.*Prime Curios

This is the 46th day of the year that is the sum of two squares.It is the sum of two squares in two different ways. 130 = 11² + 3² = 9² + 7².

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EVENTS

1741 d'Alembert is (finally) accepted to the French Academy of Sciences.  He had applied five times since March 1 of the  same year.  He was accepted as an adjunct associate astronomer at the age of 24. *Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d'Alembert: science and the Englightenment; pg 25

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1752 Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot (some say 50 ft) (12 m)-tall iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. Based on his observations, Franklin had proposed an experiment with an elevated rod or wire to "draw down the electric fire" from a cloud, with the experimenter standing in the protection of an enclosure similar to a soldier's sentry box.
Before Franklin could put his proposal into practice, D'Alibard performed his experiment in Paris. One week later, M. Delor repeated the experiment in Paris, followed in July by an Englishman, John Canton. But one unfortunate physicist did not fare so well. Georg Wilhelm Reichmann attempted to reproduce the experiment, according to Franklin's instructions, standing inside a room. A glowing ball of charge traveled down the string, jumped to his forehead and killed him instantly - providing history with the first documented example of ball lightning in the process.
As for Franklin, he was apparently unaware of these other experiments when he undertook his own version during a thunderstorm in June 1752, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Unlike Reichmann, he quite sensibly stood under a shed roof to ensure he was holding a dry, non-conducting portion of the kite string.*AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY News

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1760 Euler writes the tenth of his Letters to a German Princess.  This one on the "Compression of the air. " .  "The explanation of sound, which I have had the honor of presenting to you Highness, leads me forward to..." (The Euler Archive)

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1810 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was summoned by the King of Prussia to be Professor of Astronomy at the University at Konigsburg and to supervise the construction of an Observatory, becoming its first Director. In 1819 he developed and published Fourier series, three years before Fourier! In 1824, he first systematically studied the Bessel functions. In 1838, he made the first observation of a stellar parallax, hence of a stellar distance, of 61 Cygni, about 11 light-years away. Its parallax is less than .3" (or .3' ??) of arc – the aberration due to the Earth's motion is about 40'. He had started working on this about thirty years previously. Henderson, 1839, and Struve, 1840, made independent measurements of a stellar parallax.

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1831 Everiste Galois was arrested, following a banquet, of about 200 young republicans, that he actively attended.*VFR (SEE MAY 9)

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1845  The Spitalfields Mathematical Society  This mathematical society was founded in 1717 by Joseph Middleton who taught mathematics to sailors who required mathematical skills for navigating. It met in a public house, the Monmouth's Head, in Spitalfields which is a district just outside the east side of the city of London. The 'Mathematical Society', as it called itself, moved its meeting place a number of time over the following years but remaining in Spitalfields. In 1725 it moved to the White Horse in Wheeler Street, then in 1735 to the Ben Johnson's Head in Woodseer Street. 

Dozens of these societies were formed in the early 18th century and contributed to the learning of many tradespeople, and the financial sustenance of many mathematicians of the period.  Thomas Simpson was an early member of the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, being one of 49 members in 1736. Simpson was the most distinguished of a group of itinerant lecturers who taught in the London coffee houses. This may seems strange but in fact at this time coffee houses were sometimes called the Penny Universities because of the cheap education they provided. They would charge an entrance fee of one penny and then while customers drank coffee they could listen to lectures. Different coffee houses catered to specific interests such as art, business, law and mathematics. For example De Moivre used Slaughter's Coffee House in St Martin's Lane as a base during these years, and William Jones, who was a friend of Simpson, was able to make a living lecturing in coffee houses such as Child's Coffee House in St Paul's Churchyard. 

The actual death date of the society is not known to me, but the Society wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society who responded on 10 May 1845:-

A meeting of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society took place yesterday, and I brought forward the suggestions contained in your recent letters to me relating to the venerable Mathematical Society of London, and the Council were unanimous in regretting that this ancient Society of 130 years standing should be on the eve of dissolution and decline. The members of the Council were also, I believe, unanimous that if the nineteen surviving members of the Mathematical Society should in their liberality and public spirit wish to keep the mathematical and astronomical and philosophical portions of their library together, and should kindly and considerately offer to present it to the Royal Astronomical Society, that the Council of the latter would not only be grateful to them for this act of judicious benevolence, but would be willing to elect all the members of the Mathematical Society members for life of the Royal Astronomical Society.

*Assorted notes but much from *SAU, McTutor, Wik

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1869 the first transcontinental railroad to run West out of Chicago was completed, running to Promontory, Utah. Amidst a crowd of dignitaries and workers, with the engines No. 119 and Jupiter practically touching noses, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads were joined together. Telegraph operators transmitting to both coasts transmit the blows of the hammer as they fall on a golden spike. The nation listened as west and east came together in undivided union. *TIS

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1898 Dewar becomes the first person to liquefy Hydrogen, working in the basement laboratory of the Ri with only a few assistants. *Royal Institution web page

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1899 Parker Brothers put out Instant Insanity in 1967. But the puzzle itself was much older. Here's a patent filed on May 10, 1899 (issued April 3, 1900) by F.A. Schossow for a game that would be sold as the Katzenjammer Puzzle.  *Dave Richeson

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1910 Florence Nightingale was presented with the badge of honour of the Norwegian Red Cross Society. *VictorianWeb

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1925 John T. Scopes was given a preliminary hearing before three judges. He had been arrested and charged under a new Tennessee's state law, the Butler act, which prohibited the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools. Scopes had agreed to participate in a challenge to that law, with the support of local leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, and the American Civil Liberties Union. A few weeks later, at what became known as the Scope's Monkey Trial, he was found guilty and fined $100. Although upon appeal the fine was ruled excessive and over-ruled, the state law itself was not found unconstitutional. Thereafter, the law was not enforced, but it was not repealed until 1967.*TIS (The state of Tennessee still seems to be struggling with this issue, 2011)

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1933 Kurt Schutte, the last of Hilbert’s sixty-nine doctoral students, defends his dissertation on logic. For the full list see Hilbert’s Gesammelte Abhandlungen, vol. 3, pp. 431–433. *VFR

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In 1949, the first planetarium in the U.S. owned by a university opened at the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Morehead Planetarium, one of the largest in the U.S., was the gift of John Motley Morehead III (1870-1965), class of 1891. The Morehead Building, erected at the north end of the campus, included the 68-ft dome, 300-seat Star Theater with a Zeiss Model II Star Projector. Morehead was an industrialist and chemist who commercially developed production of calcium carbide, basic to manufacturing acetylene gas, which led to the founding of Union Carbide Corporation. As the U.S. space program began, the planetarium provided important celestial navigation training for U.S. astronauts in the Mercury program.*TIS

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1960 Triton ended her 84 day, 36,014 mile circumnavigation of the globe, the first by a submerged submarine. The ship generally followed the path of the first round the world voyager, Magellan. [Navy Facts, 181, 204] *VFR (Magellan's circumnavigation took three years, On August 10, 1519 to September 6, 1522. Of the 237 men who set out on five ships, only 18 completed the circumnavigation and managed to return to Spain in 1522.  As far as I know the Triton had no casualties.)

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2012 National Abacus Day in Japan. Today is National Abacus Day in Japan. By manipulating beads, the user of an abacus can perform simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. *CHM

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2013 An annular solar eclipse will take place on May 10, 2013, with a magnitude of 0.9544. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partially obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is smaller than the Sun, causing the Sun to look like an annulus (ring), blocking most of the Sun's light. An annular eclipse appears as a partial eclipse over a region thousands of kilometres wide.
Annularity will be visible from northern Australia and the southern Pacific Ocean, with the maximum of 6 minutes 3 seconds visible from the Pacific Ocean east of French Polynesia. *Wik

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BIRTHS

1788 Augustin Jean Fresnel (10 May 1788 - 14 July 1827, aged 39)did important work on optics where he was one of the founders of the wave theory of light.  In 1817, Young had proposed a small transverse component to light, while yet retaining a far larger longitudinal component. Fresnel, by the year 1821, was able to show via mathematical methods that polarization could be explained only if light was entirely transverse, with no longitudinal vibration whatsoever.  In the early 19th century, Poisson declared that since Fresnel’s ideas on the wave nature of light implied that the shadow cast by a disk would contain a bright spot at its center, Fresnel’s ideas were obviously flawed. The spot was later detected, proving Fresnel right!   He is perhaps best known to the general public as the inventor of the Fresnel lens, first adopted in lighthouses while he was a French commissioner of lighthouses, and found in many applications today.*Wikipedia

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1821 Baldassarre Boncompagni, (10 May 1821 – 13 April 1894),  noted historian of mathematics. He set up his own publishing house and published his own journal dealing with the history of mathematics from 1868 to 1887. He was responsible for making known the importance of Leonardo Fibonacci to the history of mathematics. *VFR Boncompagni edited Bullettino di bibliografia e di storia delle scienze matematiche e fisiche ("The bulletin of bibliography and history of mathematical and physical sciences") (1868-1887), the first Italian periodical entirely dedicated to the history of mathematics. He edited every article that appeared in the journal. He also prepared and published the first modern edition of Fibonacci's Liber Abaci.*Wik

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1847 Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing (10 May 1847 in Burbach (near Siegen), Westphalia, Germany - 11 Feb 1923 in Münster, Germany)introduced Lie algebras independently of Lie in his study of non-euclidean geometry. The classification of the simple Lie algebras by Killing was one of the finest achievements in the whole of mathematical research.*SAU

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1900 Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (10 May 1900; 7 Dec 1979 at age 79) was an English-American astronomer who was the first to apply laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies, and the first to conclude that hydrogen and helium are the two most common elements in the universe. During the 1920s, the accepted explanation of the Sun's composition was a calculation of around 65% iron and 35% hydrogen. At Harvard University, in her doctoral thesis (1925), Payne claimed that the sun's spectrum was consistent with another solution: 99% hydrogen with helium, and just 1% iron. She had difficulty persuading her superiors to take her work seriously. It was another 20 years before Payne's original claim was confirmed, by Fred Hoyle. *TIS

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1904 Edward James McShane is famous for his work in the calculus of variations, Moore-Smith theory of limits, the theory of the integral, stochastic differential equations, and ballistics. In the early 1950s United States senator Joseph R McCarthy whipped up strong feelings against communism. McShane had been asked to complete a questionnaire. One question asked:-
... whether he had ever been involved with organisations that had at any time advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
It was quite a brave move for McShane to reply "yes", because he was an employee of the State of Virginia! At the University of Virginia this sense of humour added to his popularity with both staff and graduate students.. *SAU

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1926 Oliver Gordon Selfridge (May 10, 1926 – December 3, 2008), grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges' department stores, was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception."
Selfridge was born in England, educated at Malvern College and Middlesex School and then earned an S.B. from MIT in mathematics in 1945. He then became a graduate student of Norbert Wiener's at MIT, but did not write up his doctoral research and never earned a Ph.D. While at MIT, he acted as one of the earlier reviewers for Wiener's Cybernetics book in 1949. He was also technically a supervisor of Marvin Minsky, and helped organize the first ever public meeting on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Minsky in 1955.
Selfridge wrote important early papers on neural networks and pattern recognition and machine learning, and his "Pandemonium" paper (1959) is generally recognized as a classic in artificial intelligence. In it, Selfridge introduced the notion of "demons" that record events as they occur, recognize patterns in those events, and may trigger subsequent events according to patterns they recognize. Over time, this idea gave rise to Aspect-oriented programming.
In 1968, in their formative paper "The Computer as a Communication Device", J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor introduced a concept known as an OLIVER (Online Interactive Expediter and Responder) which was named in honor of Selfridge.
Selfridge spent his career at Lincoln Laboratory, MIT (where he was Associate Director of Project MAC), Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and GTE Laboratories where he became Chief Scientist. He served on the NSA Advisory Board for 20 years, chairing the Data Processing Panel. Selfridge retired in 1993.
Selfridge also authored four children's books, "Sticks", "Fingers Come In Fives", "All About Mud", and "Trouble With Dragons". *Wik

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DEATHS

1822 IPaolo Ruffini (September 22, 1765 – May 10, 1822) Italian mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups. He is regarded as the first to make a significant attempt to show that there is no algebraic solution of the general quintic equation (an equation with the variable in one term raised to the fifth power). In 1799 Ruffini published a book on the theory of equations with his claim that quintics could not be solved by radicals, General theory of equations in which it is shown that the algebraic solution of the general equation of degree greater than four is impossible. Ruffini used group theory in his work but he had to invent the subject for himself. He also wrote on probability and the application of probability to evidence in court cases. *TIS

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1829 Thomas Young  (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) English physician and physicist who reinforced the wave theory of light with his study of interference of light. As a medical student, he had discovered the how the shape of the eye's lens changes to focus. In 1801, he recognized the cause of astigmatism. Young demonstrated the wave nature of light, polarization of light, interference fringes, and explained the colours seen in thin films such as soap bubbles. He associated wavelength with colour of light, and the eye's perception of any colour as a mixture of red, blue and green. Young's modulus is named after his work with elasticity. He also worked measuring the size of molecules, liquid surface tension. He was also an Egyptologist who helped decipher the Rosetta Stone. The museum in Cairo has another "roseta", the Decree of Canopus, in Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, issued by Ptolemy III Euergetes in -238. It decrees leap years to be included in the calendar. It was not discovered until 1866, too late to assist Young and Champollion in deciphering, but which confirmed their work.

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1924 August Gutzmer (2 Feb 1860 in Neu-Roddahn, near Neustadt an der Dosse, Germany -10 May 1924 in Halle, Germany) was a German mathematician who worked on differential equations. *SAU

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1941 Diederik Korteweg (31 March 1848 – 10 May 1941) was a Dutch mathematician with wide interests, now best-known as the joint discoverer of the Korteweg-de Vries equation for solitary waves.

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1989 Hassler Whitney (March 23, 1907 – May 10, 1989) was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, and characteristic classes. *SAU

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2009 Carol Jo Crannell (November 15, 1938 – May 10, 2009) was a solar physicist known for her work on solar flares and on the astrophysical observation of x-rays and gamma rays. She worked for thirty years at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Crannell was born in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Miami University in 1960, and completed her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in 1967, with Robert Hofstadter as her doctoral advisor. She worked at the Goddard Space Flight Center from 1974 until 2004, when she retired.
Crannell also held an adjunct faculty position at Catholic University of America, where her husband, Hall L. Crannell, is an emeritus professor. Her daughter, Annalisa Crannell, is a mathematician at Franklin & Marshall College.
Crannell's doctoral research concerned particle showers. At Goddard, Crannell pushed for x-ray and gamma-ray observations of the sun, and led balloon-mounted experiments to make these observations.
Crannell played an active role in the struggle for equal opportunity for women in physics. She chaired the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics of the American Physical Society, and helped found the CSWP Gazette, the newsletter of the Committee. Through her position at the Catholic University she also helped bring underrepresented students to summer internships at Goddard.
Crannell became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1992, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998. In 1990, Women in Aerospace gave her their Outstanding Achievement Award "for her dedication to expanding women’s opportunities for career advancement and for increasing their visibility through her activities as an aerospace professional".
*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 - May 9

Margarita philosophica of Gregor Reisch *MAA

If you ask a drunkard what number is larger, 2/3 or 3/5, he might not be able to tell you. But if you rephrase the question: What is better, 2 bottles of vodka for 3 people, or 3 bottles of vodka for 5 people, he will tell you right away.
Israel Gelfand (from Love and Math, by Edward Frenkel)

The 129th day of the year; 129 is the smallest number with four representations as a sum of three positive (but not necessarily distinct) squares: 129 = 1² + 8² + 8² = 2² + 2² + 11² = 2² + 5² + 10² = 4² + 7² + 8² .

129 is also the sum of the first ten primes.

129 is the smallest sum of distinct seventh powers (1⁷ + 2⁷).

And if you've not spent some time in Western Ky, and perhaps even if you have, you might not guess where the official Banana Capital of the US is. It's in the little town of Fulton, Ky, along the train route from New Orleans to Chicago, and Fulton had the distinction of being the place where Union Fruit company chose to pause the trains bringing fresh bananas along the way to re-ice them for the rest of their journey.At one time over 70% of Bananas shipped into the US came through Fulton. About 13 miles away is the even smaller town of Wingo, formerly called Wingo Station ( because it set along the same New Orleans and Ohio rail line passing through Fulton. And what they have in common other than that, is the reason I mention them today, they are on the ends of Ky Route 129. They are just a pretty spring drive of 40 miles from here in Possum Trot.

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EVENTS

1562 In the evening Don Carlos, son of Phillip II of Spain, and heir to the throne lay dying from a fall on a staircase a month earlier. In hopes of a miracle, the king prayed, and then caused, or allowed, the body of a 15th-Century priest from the village to be brought and laid by his son. Within days the young man recovered, and the grateful father commissioned the royal clockmaker, Juanelo Turriano, to create one of the first human form automatons in Europe, the praying monk. The incredible wind up device would walk lifelike in a square, nodding his head as his mouth moves in prayer, sometimes beating his chest, and kissing his cross and rosary. The device is now in the Smithsonian, and it still works.
For more about the story read here,  and more pictures of the automaton just search Praying Monk on your favorite search engine. 

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1664 Hooke speaks to Royal Society on finding the Giant Red Spot on Jupiter OUHOS Collections ‏@OUHOSCollection

 

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1694 Johann Bernoulli, in a letter to Leibniz, introduced the term and the explicit process of “sepera­tio indeterminatarum” or separation of variables for solving differential equations. He published it in Acta eruditorum in November, 1694. [Ince, 531] *VFR In 1691 the inverse problem of tangents led Leibniz to the implicit discovery of the method of separation of variables.

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1831 Galois party toast will lead to his arrest. Derbyshire describes the events in "Unknown Quantity, a real and imaginary history of Algebra."

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1848 “Proficiency in Algebra, the elements of geometry, trigonometry, and surveying, will give you the art of developing truth by the skilful use of the reasoning powers, and, besides, store your mind with a species of knowledge of daily practical utility to a lawyer. ... It is the helm of the mind, stering it over the shortest route from the point of departure to the destination—from cause to effect.” So wrote the American soldier Albert Sindney Johnson (1803–1862) to his son. From William Preston Johnson (the son), The Life of General Albert Sindney Johnson (1878),p. 162, as quoted by Florian Cajori in Mathematics in Liberal Education (1928), p. 103. *VFR

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1854  There is a "letter from Rankine to Thomson of 9 May 1854 in which he suggests more reasonably that the leading term in the departure from the perfect-gas laws is linear in the density, or (1/V). This turned out to be so .."  (JAMES JOULE, WILLIAM THOMSON AND THE CONCEPT OF A PERFECT GAS by J. S. ROWLINSON)

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1914 Think of all the work that mothers do in raising their children. Mothers need to be celebrated! President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed May 9, 1914, the first Mother's Day. He asked Americans on that day to give a public "thank you" to their mothers and all mothers.
Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia wanted to remember her own mother along with all mothers. Anna’s mother had been very active in working to improve the health of people in her community. Jarvis’s mother also organized a Mother’s Friendship event in her community to bring confederate and union soldiers together for a peaceful celebration. Many other women such as Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Elizabeth Smith also fought for peace and encouraged mothers to speak out. Anna Jarvis convinced her mother’s church to celebrate Mother’s Day on the anniversary of her mother’s death, and campaigned for a national day honoring mothers. Because of Jarvis’s hard work, Woodrow Wilson chose that date for the national holiday. (Library of Congress web site) This year it's May 13... Happy Birthday to Mom's everywhere.

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1926 Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to fly over the North Pole. *TIS

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1972 100 high school students took the first U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad. The purpose was to discover secondary school students with superior mathematical talent. One of the five problems on the exam was: “A random number selector can only select one of the nine integers 1, 2,..., 9, and it makes these selections with equal probability. Determine the probability that after n selections (for n larger than 1), the product of the n numbers selected will be divisible by 10.” For the winners, the other problems, and the solutions, see AMM 80 (1973), pp 276–281. *VFR
 

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2013 Surfs Up, Sun's Not, in Hawaii, at least for a moment. Solar Eclipse in Honolulu *Carey Johnson ‏@TheTelescopeGuy

2016 It happens only a little more than once a decade – and the next chance to see it is TODAY!. Throughout the U.S., sky watchers can watch Mercury pass between Earth and the sun in a rare astronomical event known as a planetary transit. Mercury will appear as a tiny black dot as it glides in front of the sun’s blazing disk over a period of seven and a half hours. Three NASA satellites will be providing images of the transit and one of them will have a near-live feed. *NASA

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BIRTHS

1746  Gaspard Monge, (9 May 1746 – 28 July 1818) noted geometer, son of a peddler and knife grinder   at Beaune, France. Today there is a statue of him in his home town. (I stumbled across it while visiting vineyards).*VFR One of the founders of descriptive geometry (the mathematics of projecting solid figures onto a plane, upon which modern engineering drawing is based) and the application of the techniques of analysis to the theory of curvature. The latter ultimately led to the revolutionary work of Georg Riemann on geometry and curvature. He became a close friend of Napoleon and was appointed minister for the navy (1792-93), but was stripped of all honours on the restoration of the Bourbons. He died in poverty. *TIS
As an active Jacobin, he was acting head of the government on the day Louis XVI was executed.  He was also Minister of the Navy. He was in official disfavor when he died and had been expelled from the Academy in 1816 (along with Lazare Carnot), but his students erected a monument with a bust. MONGE was buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise (Mausoleum at right below) but in 1989, he was translated to the Panthéon.

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1785 James Pollard Espy (9 May 1785, 24 Jan 1860) American meteorologist who was one of the first to collect meteorological observations by telegraph. He gave apparently the first essentially correct explanation of the thermodynamics of cloud formation and growth. Every great atmospheric disturbance begins with a rising mass of heated, thus less dense air. While rising, the air mass dilates and cools. Then, as water vapour precipitates as clouds, latent heat is liberated so the dilation and rising continues until the moisture of the air forming the upward current is practically exhausted. The heavier air flows in beneath, and, finding a diminished pressure above it, rushes upward with constantly increasing violence. Water vapour precipitated during this atmospheric disturbance results in heavy rains.*TIS

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1876 Gilbert Ames Bliss (9 May 1876, Chicago – 8 May 1951, Harvey, Illinois) did important work in the calculus of variations. Through­out his career at Chicago he stressed the importance of a strong union between teaching and research. *VFR  This is another one who died within a week of their birthday (he died on May 8). 

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1898 Arend Heyting (May 9, 1898 – July 9, 1980) is important in the development of intuitionistic logic and algebra.He was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a footing where it could become part of mathematical logic. Heyting gave the first formal development of intuitionistic logic in order to codify Brouwer's way of doing mathematics. The inclusion of Brouwer's name in the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation is largely honorific, as Brouwer was opposed in principle to any formalisation of intuitionistic logic (and went as far as calling Heyting's work a "sterile exercise").   *Wik

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1936 Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirillov (May 9,1936) is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, renowned for his works in the fields of representation theory, topological groups and Lie groups. In particular he introduced the orbit method into representation theory.
Kirillov studied at Moscow State University where he was a student of Israel Gelfand. His Ph.D. (kandidat) dissertation Unitary representations of nilpotent Lie groups 1962 was so successful that he was awarded the much higher degree of Doctor of Science instead. At the time he was the youngest Doctor of Science in the Soviet Union. He worked at the Moscow State University until 1994 when he became the Francis J. Carey Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania.
During his school years, Kirillov was a winner of many mathematics competitions, and he is still an active organizer of Russian mathematical contests. Kirillov is an author of many popular school-oriented books and articles.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Kirillov's son, Alexander Kirillov, Jr., is also a mathematician, working on the representation theory of Lie groups at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. *Wik

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1950 Esteban Terrades i Illa (15 September 1883;Barcelona,- 9 May 1950,Madrid,) was a Spanish mathematician, scientist and engineer. He researched and taught widely in the fields of mathematics and the physical sciences, working not only in his native Catalonia, but also in the rest of Spain and in South America. He was also active as a consultant in the Spanish aeronautics, electric power, telephone and railway industries. *Wik

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DEATHS

1525 Gregor Reisch (born at Balingen in Württemberg, about 1467; died at Freiburg, Baden, 9 May 1525) was a German Carthusian humanist writer. He is best known for his Margarita philosophica, which first appeared at Freiburg in 1503. It is an encyclopedia of knowledge intended as a text-book for youthful students, and contains in twelve books Latin grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, physics, natural history, physiology, psychology, and ethics. The usefulness of the work was increased by numerous woodcuts and a full index. *Wik
Image of Calculating-Table by Gregor Reisch: Margarita Philosophica, 1503. The woodcut shows Arithmetica instructing an algorist and an abacist (inaccurately represented as Boethius and Pythagoras). There was keen competition between the two from the introduction of the Algebra into Europe in the 12th century until its triumph in the 16th.

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1931 Albert Abraham Michelson (December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) German-born American physicist who accurately measured the speed of light and received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations" he carried out with them. He designed the highly accurate Michelson interferometer and used it to establish the speed of light as a fundamental constant. With Edward Morley, he also used it in an attempt to measure the velocity of the earth through the ether (1887). The experiment yielded null results that eventually led Einstein to his theory of relativity. He measured the standard meter bar in Paris to be 1,553,163.5 wavelengths of the red cadmium line (1892-3). *TIS  There is a marker near the place where the experiment was done.  It says, "Near this spot, in July 1887, Dr. Albert A. Michelson of Case and Dr. Edward W. Morley of Western Reserve University conducted the world-famous Michelson-Morley experiment, one of the outstanding scientific achievements of the 19th century and a cornerstone of modern physics. In commemoration, this tablet has been set in stone by both colleges on December 19, 1952, the 100th anniversary of Dr. Michelson's birth.

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 - May 8

A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle.

G. K. Chesterton

The 128th day of the year; 128 is The largest known even number that can be expressed as the sum of two primes in exactly three ways. (Find them) *Prime Curios   How many smaller numbers (and which) are there that can be so expressed?

128 is also the largest number that cannot be expressed as the sum of distinct squares. *Number Gossip. (Surprisingly, there are only 31 numbers that can not be expressed as the sum of distinct squares. )

128 can be expressed by a combination of its digits with mathematical operators thus 128 = 2^{8 - 1}, making it a Friedman number in base 10 (Friedman numbers are named after Erich Friedman, as of 2013 an Associate Professor of Mathematics and ex-chairman of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Stetson University, located in DeLand, Florida.)

128 the sum of the factorials of the first three prime numbers, 2! + 3! + 5! =128.

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EVENTS

1654 Otto von Guericke demonstrates the Magdenburg hemispheres in front of the imperial Diet, and the Emperor Ferdinand IIII in Regensburg.
The Magdeburg hemispheres, around 50 cm (20 inches) in diameter, were designed to demonstrate the vacuum pump that Guericke had invented. One of them had a tube connection to attach the pump, with a valve to close it off. When the air was sucked out from inside the hemispheres, and the valve was closed, the hose from the pump could be detached, and they were held firmly together by the air pressure of the surrounding atmosphere.
Thirty horses, in two teams of fifteen, could not separate the hemispheres until the valve was opened to equalize the air pressure. In 1656 he repeated the demonstration with sixteen horses (two teams of eight) in his hometown of Magdeburg, where he was mayor. He also took the two spheres, hung the two hemispheres with a support, and removed the air from within. He then strapped weights to the spheres, but the spheres would not budge.Gaspar Schott was the first to describe the experiment in print in his Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica (1657).
In 1663 (or, according to some sources, in 1661) the same demonstration was given in Berlin before Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg with twenty-four horses. It is unclear how strong a vacuum Guericke's pump was able to achieve, but if it was able to evacuate all of the air from the inside, the hemispheres would have been held together with a force of around 20 000 N (4400 lbf, or 2.2 short tons), equivalent to lifting a car or small elephant; a dramatic demonstration of the pressure of the atmosphere. *Wik

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1661 “On 8 May 1661 the Society’s Journal Book notes that ‘a motion was made for the erecting of a library’, and later in the same month ‘it was resolved that every member, who hath published or shall publish any work, give the Society one copy’.” (from Emma Davidson at RSI)

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1774 The conjunction of the Planets Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury and the Moon on this date would herald the apocalypse according to a treatise by Eelco Alta, a Frisian clergyman and theologian. However, the apocalypse did not occur, perhaps because the projected conjunction of the heavenly bodies never occurred. One good result attributed to the treatise was the creation of what is now the oldest continuously operating planetarium in the world, the Eise Eisinga Planetarium in the ceiling of his former home in the Netherlands. It is driven by a pendulum clock, which has 9 weights or ponds. The planets move around the model in real time, automatically. (A slight "re-setting" must be done by hand every four years to compensate for the February 29th of a leap year.) In addition to the basic orrery, there are displays of the phase of the moon and other astronomical phenomena. The planetarium includes a display for the current time and date. The plank that has the year numbers written on it has to be replaced every 22 years. To create the gears for the model, 10,000 handmade nails were used. *Wik *collected notes

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1790 The Assembly (French) ordered the Académie des Sciences to standardize weights and measures on 8 May 1790. The Académie appointed a Commission of Lagrange, Borda, Condorcet, Laplace and Tillet to compare the decimal and duodecimal systems. Another Commission, with Monge instead of Tillet, was to examine how to make a standard of length. The Commissions continued functioning through the Revolution.

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1794 Lavoisier Guillotined along with twenty-seven other members of the Ferme Générale, including his father-in-law. See Deaths below

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1795 French astronomer Jerome Lalande observes a "star". It is in fact the planet Neptune, which is not officially discovered until 1846. * Liz Suckow@LizMSuckow
A second recording, noting a possible error on the 10th was entered. Discovery of these recordings 1n 1947 by Sears C. Walker of the U.S. Naval Observatory led to a better calculation of the planet's orbit. *Wik

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In 1886, Coca-Cola, the soft drink, was first sold to the public at the soda fountain in Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia. It was invented by pharmacist, John Stith Pemberton, who mixed it in a 30-gal. brass kettle hung over a backyard fire. Until 1905, the drink, marketed as a "brain and nerve tonic," contained extracts of cocaine as well as the caffeine-rich kola nut. The name, using two C's from its ingredients, was suggested by his bookkeeper Frank Robinson, whose excellent penmanship provided the first scripted "Coca-Cola" letters as the famous logo. Asa Candler marketed Coke to world after buying the company from Pemberton. *TIS

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1910 The New York Times Sunday Magazine publishes banner headline, "Fears Of The Comet Are Foolish And Ungrounded," only ten days before the Earth moves into the tail of Halley's Comet. The article featured the famous female astronomer, Mary Proctor, debunking horror stories such as :

Here is a gigantic monster in the sky with a head over two hundred thousand miles in width… and a train two million miles in length, rushing through space at the alarming rate of a thousand miles a minute.
On May 18 the earth will be plunged in this white hot mass of glowing gas, and, according to the report of the ignorant and superstitious, the world will be set on fire.
These sensation makers further say that the oceans on the side facing the comet will be boiled by the intense heat, and the land scorched and blistered as the dread wanderer passes by on its baneful way.

*SundayMagazine.org

Halley’s comet approached Earth and killed England’s King Edward VII, according to some superstitious folk. No one could definitively say how it did, but it certainly did. And that wasn’t its only offense. The Brits also figured it was an omen of a coming invasion by the Germans, while the French reckoned it was responsible for flooding the Seine. 

A French Scientist named Camille Flammarion, in typical French despair, reckoned that as we passed through the comet’s tail, “cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet,” *Wired

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1932 The USS Akron, an American dirigible and the world's first purpose-built flying aircraft carrier, flew mail from Lakehurst, New Jersey,  to San Diego, On This Day in 1932. The ship reached Camp Kearny in San Diego, on the morning of 11 May and attempted to moor. Since neither trained ground handlers nor specialized mooring equipment were present, the landing at Camp Kearny was fraught with danger. By the time the crew started the evaluation, the helium gas had been warmed by sunlight, increasing lift. Lightened by 40 short tons (36 t), the amount of fuel spent during the transcontinental trip, the Akron was now all but uncontrollable.

The mooring cable was cut to avert a catastrophic nose-stand by the errant airship which floated upward. Most of the mooring crew—predominantly "boot" seamen from the Naval Training Station San Diego—released their lines although four did not. One let go at about 15 ft (4.6 m) and suffered a broken arm while the three others were carried further aloft. Of these Aviation Carpenter's Mate 3rd Class Robert H. Edsall and Apprentice Seaman Nigel M. Henton soon plunged to their deaths while Apprentice Seaman C. M. "Bud" Cowart held on to his line until being hoisted on board the airship an hour later. The Akron moored at Camp Kearny later that day before proceeding to Sunnyvale, California. The deadly accident was recorded on newsreel film. *Postal Museum @PostalMuseum *Wik

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1961 President J. F. Kennedy presented astronaut Alan B. Shepard the first National Aeronautics and Space Administration Distinguished Flying Medal for making America’s first space flight on May 5, 1961.*VFR

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BIRTHS

1859 Johan Ludwig William Valdemar Jensen (8 May 1859 – 5 March 1925) contributed to the Riemann Hypothesis, proving a theorem which he sent to Mittag-Leffler who published it in 1899. The theorem is important, but does not lead to a solution of the Riemann Hypothesis as Jensen had hoped. It expresses
... the mean value of the logarithm of the absolute value of a holomorphic function on a circle by means of the distances of the zeros from the centre and the value at the centre.
He also studied infinite series, the gamma function and inequalities for convex functions.*SAU

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1905 Karol Borsuk (May 8, 1905, Warsaw – January 24, 1982, Warsaw) Polish mathematician. His main interest was topology.
Borsuk introduced the theory of absolute retracts (ARs) and absolute neighborhood retracts (ANRs), and the cohomotopy groups, later called Borsuk-Spanier cohomotopy groups. He also founded the so called Shape theory. He has constructed various beautiful examples of topological spaces, e.g. an acyclic, 3-dimensional continuum which admits a fixed point free homeomorphism onto itself; also 2-dimensional, contractible polyhedra which have no free edge. His topological and geometric conjectures and themes stimulated research for more than half a century. *Wik

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DEATHS

1794 Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794) after a trial that lasted less than a day, a revolutionary tribunal condemned Antoine Laurent Lavoisier to death. He was 51 and guillotined on the same afternoon.  " It took only a moment to cause this head to fall and a hundred years will not suffice to produce its like." Joseph Louis Lagrange, the day of Lavoisier’s execution.
Lavoisier was guillotined in the terror following the French Revolution. In 1778, he found that air consists of a mixture of two gases which he called oxygen and nitrogen. By studying the role of oxygen in combustion, he replaced the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier also discovered the law of conservation of mass and devised the modern method of naming compounds, which replaced the older nonsystematic method. Under the Reign of Terror, despite his eminence and his services to science and France, he came under attack as a former Ferme Générale. In November 1793, all former members of the Ferme Générale including Lavoisier and his father-in-law, were arrested and imprisoned. After a trial that lasted less than a day, they were all found guilty of conspiracy against the people of France and condemned. When Lavoisier requested time to complete some scientific work, the presiding judge was said to have answered "The Republic has no need of scientists." He was guillotined and thrown in a common grave in the Cimetière de Picpus. Mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange lamented the execution: "It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century." About eighteen months following his death, Lavoisier was exonerated by the French government. When his belongings were delivered to his widow, a brief note was included reading "To the widow of Lavoisier, who was falsely convicted."
For more about Lavoisier see SomeBeans blog

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1853 John Farrar (July 1, 1779 – May 8, 1853) died at Cambridge, Massachusetts.His translations from the French, including Legendre’s Elements of Geometry (Boston, 1819),were widely used in the U. S. *VFR
He first coined the concept of hurricanes as “a moving vortex and not the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere”, after the Great September Gale of 1815. Farrar
remained Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University between 1807 and 1836. During this time, he introducedmodern mathematics into the curriculum. He was
also a regular contributor to the scientific journals. *Wikipedia He is buried in MountAuburn Cemetery Cambridge, Massachusetts,USA.*Wik

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1904 Eadweard Muybridge English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. For his work on human and animal motion, he invented a superfast shutter. Leland Stanford, former governor of California, hired Muybridge to settle a hotly debated issue: Is there a moment in a horse’s gait when all four hooves are off the ground at once? In 1972, Muybridge took up the challenge. In 1878, he succeeded in taking a sequence of photographs with 12 cameras that captured the moment when the animal’s hooves were tucked under its belly. Publication of these photographs made Muybridge an international celebrity. Another noteworthy event in his life was that he was tried (but acquitted) for the murder of his wife's lover. *TIS

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1951 Gilbert Ames Bliss, (9 May 1876, Chicago – 8 May 1951, Harvey, Illinois), was an American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations. Bliss once headed a government commission that devised rules for apportioning seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the several states. *Wikipedia

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1959 Renato Caccioppoli (20 January 1904 – 8 May 1959) His most important works, out of a total of around eighty publications, relate to functional analysis and the calculus of variations. Beginning in 1930 he dedicated himself to the study of differential equations, the first to use a topological-functional approach. Proceeding in this way, in 1931 he extended the Brouwer fixed point theorem, applying the results obtained both from ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations.
In 1932 he introduced the general concept of inversion of functional correspondence, showing that a transformation between two Banach spaces is invertible only if it is locally invertible and if the only convergent sequences are the compact ones.
Between 1933 and 1938 he applied his results to elliptic equations, establishing the majorizing limits for their solutions, generalizing the two-dimensional case of Felix Bernstein. At the same time he studied analytic functions of several complex variables, i.e. analytic functions whose domain belongs to the vector space Cn, proving in 1933 the fundamental theorem on normal families of such functions: if a family is normal with respect to every complex variable, it is also normal with respect to the set of the variables. He also proved a logarithmic residue formula for functions of two complex variables in 1949.
In 1935 Caccioppoli proved the analyticity of class C² solutions of elliptic equations with analytic coefficients.
The year 1952 saw the publication of his masterwork on the area of a surface and measure theory, the article Measure and integration of dimensionally oriented sets (Misura e integrazione degli insiemi dimensionalmente orientati, Rendiconti dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, s. VIII, v.12). The article is mainly concerned with the theory of dimensionally oriented sets; that is, an interpretation of surfaces as oriented boundaries of sets in space. Also in this paper, the family of sets approximable by polygonal domains of finite perimeter, known today as Caccioppoli sets or sets of finite perimeter, was introduced and studied.
His last works, produced between 1952 and 1953, deal about a class of pseudoanalytic functions, introduced by him to extend certain properties of analytic functions.
In his last years, the disappointments of politics and his wife's desertion, together perhaps with the weakening of his mathematical vein, pushed him into alcoholism. His growing instability had sharpened his "strangenesses", to the point that the news of his suicide on May 8, 1959 by a gunshot to the head did not surprise those who knew him. He died at his home in Palazzo Cellammare
In 1992 his tormented personality was remembered in a film directed by Mario Martone, The Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician (Morte di un matematico napoletano), in which he was portrayed by Carlo Cecchi. * Wik

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1953 Benjamin Fedorovich Kagan (10 March 1869 in Shavli, Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania)
- 8 May 1953 in Moscow, USSR) Kagan worked on the foundations of geometry and his first work was on Lobachevsky's geometry. In 1902 he proposed axioms and definitions very different from Hilbert. Kagan studied tensor differential geometry after going to Moscow because of an interest in relativity.
Kagan wrote a history of non-euclidean geometry and also a detailed biography of Lobachevsky. He edited Lobachevsky's complete works which appeared in five volumes between 1946 and 1951. *SAU

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1960 Henry Whitehead was a topologist and differential geometer who is best remembered for his work on homotopy equivalence. *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