The Kiss Precise, Soddy's Circle Theorem

Soddy's formula is another example of Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", so as to avoid this law about laws disobeying its very own decree.

Soddy's formula is about the relationship of the radii of four mutually tangent circles. The formula is sometimes called the "Kissing Circles Theorem". If four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must intersect at six distinct points. The first demonstration of this relationship between four mutually tangent circles (actually, one can be a line) was in 1643. Rene Descartes sent a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in which he showed that the four radii, r₁, r₂, r₃, r₄, must be such that \( \frac{1}{r^2_{1}}+ \frac{1}{r^2_{2}}+\frac{1}{r^2_3}+\frac{1}{r^2_4}= \frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{r_1}+\frac{1}{r_2}+\frac{1}{r_3}+\frac{1}{r_4} )^2\)

For this reason the theorem is often called Descarte's circle theorem. The figure shows four circles all externally tangent to each other, but could also be drawn with three tangent circles all inside, and tangent to, a fourth circle. The bend of this externally tangent circle is given a negative value, and thus the same equation provides its radius also.

The equation can be written much more easily, and usually is, using a notation of "bend". For each value let the "bend" equal the reciprocal of the radius, then \(\frac{1}{r_1} =b_1\)With this notation the formula can be written as \(b^2_1 + b^2_2+b^2_3+b^2_4=\frac{1}{2}(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4)^2\).

It seems that it may also have been discovered about the same time in Japan. In the book, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry, by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, there is an illustration of a complicated pattern of nested congruent circles, for which knowledge of the theorem would seem to be required, on a wooden tablet. It was a practice during the Edo period in Japan that people from every segment of society would inscribed geometry solutions on wooden tablets called sangaku and hang them as offerings in temples and shrines.
The Theorem was rediscovered and published in the 1841 The Lady's and Gentleman's diary by an amateur English Mathematician named Phillip Beecroft. Beecroft also observed that there exist four other circles that would each be mutually tangent at the same four points. These circles would have tangents perpendicular to the original circles tangents at each point of intersection. Both sets of Beecroft's circles are shown in this illustration from Mad Math.
Beecroft's circles are related to the use of a geometrical inversion in a circle which will invert the inner tangent circle to become an outer tangent circle. The circle of inversion between the two is the circle Beecroft uses that passes through the three points of tangent in the other three circles. (A nice explanation and illustration of this is at this AMS site.

In 1936 Sir Fredrick Soddy rediscovered the theorem again. Soddy may also be known to students of Science for receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for the discovery of the decay sequences of radioactive isotopes.  According to Oliver Sacks' wonderful book, Uncle Tungsten, Soddy also created the term "isotope" and was the first to use the term  "chain reaction".  In a strange "chain reaction" of ideas, Soddy played a part in the US developing an atomic bomb.  Soddy's book, The  Interpretation of Radium, inspired  H G Wells to write The World Set Free in 1914, and he dedicated the novel to Soddy's book. Twenty years later, Wells' book set Leo Szilard to thinking about the possibility of Chain reactions, and how they might be used to create a bomb, leading to his getting a British patent on the idea in 1936.  A few years later Szilard encouraged his friend, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb.  The prize-winning science-fiction writer, Frederik Pohl, talks about Szilard's epiphany in Chasing Science (pg 25),

".. we know the exact spot where Leo Szilard got the idea that led to the atomic bomb.  There isn't even a plaque to mark it, but it happened in 1938, while he was waiting for a traffic light to change on London's Southampton Row.  Szilard had been remembering H. G. Well's old science-fiction novel about atomic power, The World Set Free and had been reading about the nuclear-fission experiment of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the lightbulb went on over his head."

Perhaps Soddy's name is appropriate for the formula if only for the unique way he presented his discovery. He presented it in the form of a poem which is presented below.

The Kiss Precise
by
Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.

To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.

If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.

Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four,
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_, June 20, 1936

One may notice in the last verse that Soddy generalizes the theorem to five spheres. The extended theorem becomes: \[ b_1^2+b_2^2+b_3^2+b_4^2+b_5^2 = \frac13(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4+b_5)^2. \]

Later   another verse was written by Thorold Gosset to describe the even more general   case in N dimensions for N+2 hyperspheres of the Nth dimension.

On August 15, 1936, only a few months after Soddy's poem had been published in Nature,  Gosset sent a copy of the poem to Donal Coxeter on the occasion of his wedding in the Round Church in Cambridge.  Gossett enclosed in his wedding congratulations, and his extension of the poem to the higher dimensions which were Coxeter's special area of study. It would be published in Nature the following year,
 

The Kiss Precise (Generalized) by Thorold Gosset

And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears,
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares -
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_
    January 9, 1937.

Fred Lunnon sent me a kind note correcting a typing oversight, and adding that

"The original result generalizes nicely to curved n-space with
curvature v [e.g. v^2 = +1 for elliptic space, -1 for hyperbolic]
in the form



        \((\sum_i x_i)^2 - n \sum_i x_i^2 = 2n v^2\)




where \(x_i\) denote the curvatures of n+2 mutually tangent spheres.
Example: n = 2, v = 0, x = [-1,2,2,3] is one solution, corresponding to
a unit circle in the plane enclosing circles of radii 1/2,1/2,1/3.



See Ivars Petersen "Circle Game" in Science News (2001) \bf 159 (16) p.254"

 

Fred admits he wasn't the first to prove this, but did manage to replicate it on his own (which impresses the heck out of me)... but THEN....... wait for it.... He wrote another poem verse to accompany this extension to higher dimensions...

  The Kiss Precise (Further Generalized) by Fred Lunnon



    How frightfully pedestrian

    My predecessors were

    To pose in space Euclidean

    Each fraternising sphere!

    Let Gauss' k squared be positive

    When space becomes elliptic,

    And conversely turn negative

    For spaces hyperbolic:

    Squared sum of bends is sum times n

    Of twice k squared plus squares of bends.

---

The Kiss Precise, Soddy's Circle Theorem

  Soddy's formula is another example of Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", so as to avoid this law about laws disobeying its very own decree.

Soddy's formula is about the relationship of the radii of four mutually tangent circles. The formula is sometimes called the "Kissing Circles Theorem". If four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must intersect at six distinct points. The first demonstration of this relationship between four mutually tangent circles (actually, one can be a line) was in 1643. Rene Descartes sent a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in which he showed that the four radii, r₁, r₂, r₃, r₄, must be such that \( \frac{1}{r^2_{1}}+ \frac{1}{r^2_{2}}+\frac{1}{r^2_3}+\frac{1}{r^2_4}= \frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{r_1}+\frac{1}{r_2}+\frac{1}{r_3}+\frac{1}{r_4} )^2\)

For this reason the theorem is often called Descarte's circle theorem. The figure shows four circles all externally tangent to each other, but could also be drawn with three tangent circles all inside, and tangent to, a fourth circle. The bend of this externally tangent circle is given a negative value, and thus the same equation provides its radius also.

The equation can be written much more easily, and usually is, using a notation of "bend". For each value let the "bend" equal the reciprocal of the radius, then \(\frac{1}{r_1} =b_1\)With this notation the formula can be written as \(b^2_1 + b^2_2+b^2_3+b^2_4=\frac{1}{2}(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4)^2\).

It seems that it may also have been discovered about the same time in Japan. In the book, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry, by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, there is an illustration of a complicated pattern of nested congruent circles, for which knowledge of the theorem would seem to be required, on a wooden tablet. It was a practice during the Edo period in Japan that people from every segment of society would inscribed geometry solutions on wooden tablets called sangaku and hang them as offerings in temples and shrines.
The Theorem was rediscovered and published in the 1841 The Lady's and Gentleman's diary by an amateur English Mathematician named Phillip Beecroft. Beecroft also observed that there exist four other circles that would each be mutually tangent at the same four points. These circles would have tangents perpendicular to the original circles tangents at each point of intersection. Both sets of Beecroft's circles are shown in this illustration from Mad Math.
Beecroft's circles are related to the use of a geometrical inversion in a circle which will invert the inner tangent circle to become an outer tangent circle. The circle of inversion between the two is the circle Beecroft uses that passes through the three points of tangent in the other three circles. (A nice explanation and illustration of this is at this AMS site.

In 1936 Sir Fredrick Soddy rediscovered the theorem again. Soddy may also be known to students of Science for receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for the discovery of the decay sequences of radioactive isotopes.  According to Oliver Sacks' wonderful book, Uncle Tungsten, Soddy also created the term "isotope" and was the first to use the term  "chain reaction".  In a strange "chain reaction" of ideas, Soddy played a part in the US developing an atomic bomb.  Soddy's book, The  Interpretation of Radium, inspired  H G Wells to write The World Set Free in 1914, and he dedicated the novel to Soddy's book. Twenty years later, Wells' book set Leo Szilard to thinking about the possibility of Chain reactions, and how they might be used to create a bomb, leading to his getting a British patent on the idea in 1936.  A few years later Szilard encouraged his friend, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb.  The prize-winning science-fiction writer, Frederik Pohl, talks about Szilard's epiphany in Chasing Science (pg 25),

".. we know the exact spot where Leo Szilard got the idea that led to the atomic bomb.  There isn't even a plaque to mark it, but it happened in 1938, while he was waiting for a traffic light to change on London's Southampton Row.  Szilard had been remembering H. G. Well's old science-fiction novel about atomic power, The World Set Free and had been reading about the nuclear-fission experiment of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the lightbulb went on over his head."

Perhaps Soddy's name is appropriate for the formula if only for the unique way he presented his discovery. He presented it in the form of a poem which is presented below.

The Kiss Precise
by
Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.

To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.

If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.

Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four,
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_, June 20, 1936

One may notice in the last verse that Soddy generalizes the theorem to five spheres. The extended theorem becomes: \[ b_1^2+b_2^2+b_3^2+b_4^2+b_5^2 = \frac13(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4+b_5)^2. \]

Later   another verse was written by Thorold Gosset to describe the even more general   case in N dimensions for N+2 hyperspheres of the Nth dimension.

On August 15, 1936, only a few months after Soddy's poem had been published in Nature,  Gosset sent a copy of the poem to Donal Coxeter on the occasion of his wedding in the Round Church in Cambridge.  Gossett enclosed in his wedding congratulations, and his extension of the poem to the higher dimensions which were Coxeter's special area of study. It would be published in Nature the following year,
 

The Kiss Precise (Generalized) by Thorold Gosset

And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears,
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares -
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_
    January 9, 1937.

Fred Lunnon sent me a kind note correcting a typing oversight, and adding that

"The original result generalizes nicely to curved n-space with
curvature v [e.g. v^2 = +1 for elliptic space, -1 for hyperbolic]
in the form



        \((\sum_i x_i)^2 - n \sum_i x_i^2 = 2n v^2\)




where \(x_i\) denote the curvatures of n+2 mutually tangent spheres.
Example: n = 2, v = 0, x = [-1,2,2,3] is one solution, corresponding to
a unit circle in the plane enclosing circles of radii 1/2,1/2,1/3.



See Ivars Petersen "Circle Game" in Science News (2001) \bf 159 (16) p.254"

 

Fred admits he wasn't the first to prove this, but did manage to replicate it on his own (which impresses the heck out of me)... but THEN....... wait for it.... He wrote another poem verse to accompany this extension to higher dimensions...

  The Kiss Precise (Further Generalized) by Fred Lunnon



    How frightfully pedestrian

    My predecessors were

    To pose in space Euclidean

    Each fraternising sphere!

    Let Gauss' k squared be positive

    When space becomes elliptic,

    And conversely turn negative

    For spaces hyperbolic:

    Squared sum of bends is sum times n

    Of twice k squared plus squares of bends.

---

The Kiss Precise, Soddy's Circle Theorem

Soddy's formula is another example of Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", so as to avoid this law about laws disobeying its very own decree.

Soddy's formula is about the relationship of the radii of four mutually tangent circles. The formula is sometimes called the "Kissing Circles Theorem". If four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must intersect at six distinct points. The first demonstration of this relationship between four mutually tangent circles (actually, one can be a line) was in 1643. Rene Descartes sent a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in which he showed that the four radii, r₁, r₂, r₃, r₄, must be such that \( \frac{1}{r^2_{1}}+ \frac{1}{r^2_{2}}+\frac{1}{r^2_3}+\frac{1}{r^2_4}= \frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{r_1}+\frac{1}{r_2}+\frac{1}{r_3}+\frac{1}{r_4} )^2\)

For this reason the theorem is often called Descarte's circle theorem. The figure shows four circles all externally tangent to each other, but could also be drawn with three tangent circles all inside, and tangent to, a fourth circle. The bend of this externally tangent circle is given a negative value, and thus the same equation provides its radius also.

The equation can be written much more easily, and usually is, using a notation of "bend". For each value let the "bend" equal the reciprocal of the radius, then \(\frac{1}{r_1} =b_1\)With this notation the formula can be written as \(b^2_1 + b^2_2+b^2_3+b^2_4=\frac{1}{2}(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4)^2\).

It seems that it may also have been discovered about the same time in Japan. In the book, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry, by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, there is an illustration of a complicated pattern of nested congruent circles, for which knowledge of the theorem would seem to be required, on a wooden tablet. It was a practice during the Edo period in Japan that people from every segment of society would inscribed geometry solutions on wooden tablets called sangaku and hang them as offerings in temples and shrines.
The Theorem was rediscovered and published in the 1841 The Lady's and Gentleman's diary by an amateur English Mathematician named Phillip Beecroft. Beecroft also observed that there exist four other circles that would each be mutually tangent at the same four points. These circles would have tangents perpendicular to the original circles tangents at each point of intersection. Both sets of Beecroft's circles are shown in this illustration from Mad Math.
Beecroft's circles are related to the use of a geometrical inversion in a circle which will invert the inner tangent circle to become an outer tangent circle. The circle of inversion between the two is the circle Beecroft uses that passes through the three points of tangent in the other three circles. (A nice explanation and illustration of this is at this AMS site.

In 1936 Sir Fredrick Soddy rediscovered the theorem again. Soddy may also be known to students of Science for receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for the discovery of the decay sequences of radioactive isotopes.  According to Oliver Sacks' wonderful book, Uncle Tungsten, Soddy also created the term "isotope" and was the first to use the term  "chain reaction".  In a strange "chain reaction" of ideas, Soddy played a part in the US developing an atomic bomb.  Soddy's book, The  Interpretation of Radium, inspired  H G Wells to write The World Set Free in 1914, and he dedicated the novel to Soddy's book. Twenty years later, Wells' book set Leo Szilard to thinking about the possibility of Chain reactions, and how they might be used to create a bomb, leading to his getting a British patent on the idea in 1936.  A few years later Szilard encouraged his friend, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb.  The prize-winning science-fiction writer, Frederik Pohl, talks about Szilard's epiphany in Chasing Science (pg 25),

".. we know the exact spot where Leo Szilard got the idea that led to the atomic bomb.  There isn't even a plaque to mark it, but it happened in 1938, while he was waiting for a traffic light to change on London's Southampton Row.  Szilard had been remembering H. G. Well's old science-fiction novel about atomic power, The World Set Free and had been reading about the nuclear-fission experiment of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the lightbulb went on over his head."

Perhaps Soddy's name is appropriate for the formula if only for the unique way he presented his discovery. He presented it in the form of a poem which is presented below.

The Kiss Precise
by
Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.

To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.

If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.

Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four,
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_, June 20, 1936

One may notice in the last verse that Soddy generalizes the theorem to five spheres. The extended theorem becomes: \[ b_1^2+b_2^2+b_3^2+b_4^2+b_5^2 = \frac13(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4+b_5)^2. \]

Later   another verse was written by Thorold Gosset to describe the even more general   case in N dimensions for N+2 hyperspheres of the Nth dimension.

On August 15, 1936, only a few months after Soddy's poem had been published in Nature,  Gosset sent a copy of the poem to Donal Coxeter on the occasion of his wedding in the Round Church in Cambridge.  Gossett enclosed in his wedding congratulations, and his extension of the poem to the higher dimensions which were Coxeter's special area of study. It would be published in Nature the following year,
 

The Kiss Precise (Generalized) by Thorold Gosset

And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears,
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares -
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_
    January 9, 1937.

Fred Lunnon sent me a kind note correcting a typing oversight, and adding that

"The original result generalizes nicely to curved n-space with
curvature v [e.g. v^2 = +1 for elliptic space, -1 for hyperbolic]
in the form



        \((\sum_i x_i)^2 - n \sum_i x_i^2 = 2n v^2\)




where \(x_i\) denote the curvatures of n+2 mutually tangent spheres.
Example: n = 2, v = 0, x = [-1,2,2,3] is one solution, corresponding to
a unit circle in the plane enclosing circles of radii 1/2,1/2,1/3.



See Ivars Petersen "Circle Game" in Science News (2001) \bf 159 (16) p.254"

 

Fred admits he wasn't the first to prove this, but did manage to replicate it on his own (which impresses the heck out of me)... but THEN....... wait for it.... He wrote another poem verse to accompany this extension to higher dimensions...

  The Kiss Precise (Further Generalized) by Fred Lunnon



    How frightfully pedestrian

    My predecessors were

    To pose in space Euclidean

    Each fraternising sphere!

    Let Gauss' k squared be positive

    When space becomes elliptic,

    And conversely turn negative

    For spaces hyperbolic:

    Squared sum of bends is sum times n

    Of twice k squared plus squares of bends.

---

The Kiss Precise, Soddy's Circle Theorem

Soddy's formula is another example of Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", so as to avoid this law about laws disobeying its very own decree.

Soddy's formula is about the relationship of the radii of four mutually tangent circles. The formula is sometimes called the "Kissing Circles Theorem". If four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must intersect at six distinct points. The first demonstration of this relationship between four mutually tangent circles (actually, one can be a line) was in 1643. Rene Descartes sent a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in which he showed that the four radii, r₁, r₂, r₃, r₄, must be such that \( \frac{1}{r^2_{1}}+ \frac{1}{r^2_{2}}+\frac{1}{r^2_3}+\frac{1}{r^2_4}= \frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{r_1}+\frac{1}{r_2}+\frac{1}{r_3}+\frac{1}{r_4} )^2\)

For this reason the theorem is often called Descarte's circle theorem. The figure shows four circles all externally tangent to each other, but could also be drawn with three tangent circles all inside, and tangent to, a fourth circle. The bend of this externally tangent circle is given a negative value, and thus the same equation provides its radius also.

The equation can be written much more easily, and usually is, using a notation of "bend". For each value let the "bend" equal the reciprocal of the radius, then \(\frac{1}{r_1} =b_1\)With this notation the formula can be written as \(b^2_1 + b^2_2+b^2_3+b^2_4=\frac{1}{2}(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4)^2\).

It seems that it may also have been discovered about the same time in Japan. In the book, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry, by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, there is an illustration of a complicated pattern of nested congruent circles, for which knowledge of the theorem would seem to be required, on a wooden tablet. It was a practice during the Edo period in Japan that people from every segment of society would inscribed geometry solutions on wooden tablets called sangaku and hang them as offerings in temples and shrines.
The Theorem was rediscovered and published in the 1841 The Lady's and Gentleman's diary by an amateur English Mathematician named Phillip Beecroft. Beecroft also observed that there exist four other circles that would each be mutually tangent at the same four points. These circles would have tangents perpendicular to the original circles tangents at each point of intersection. Both sets of Beecroft's circles are shown in this illustration from Mad Math.
Beecroft's circles are related to the use of a geometrical inversion in a circle which will invert the inner tangent circle to become an outer tangent circle. The circle of inversion between the two is the circle Beecroft uses that passes through the three points of tangent in the other three circles. (A nice explanation and illustration of this is at this AMS site.

In 1936 Sir Fredrick Soddy rediscovered the theorem again. Soddy may also be known to students of Science for receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for the discovery of the decay sequences of radioactive isotopes.  According to Oliver Sacks' wonderful book, Uncle Tungsten, Soddy also created the term "isotope" and was the first to use the term  "chain reaction".  In a strange "chain reaction" of ideas, Soddy played a part in the US developing an atomic bomb.  Soddy's book, The  Interpretation of Radium, inspired  H G Wells to write The World Set Free in 1914, and he dedicated the novel to Soddy's book. Twenty years later, Wells' book set Leo Szilard to thinking about the possibility of Chain reactions, and how they might be used to create a bomb, leading to his getting a British patent on the idea in 1936.  A few years later Szilard encouraged his friend, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb.  The prize-winning science-fiction writer, Frederik Pohl, talks about Szilard's epiphany in Chasing Science (pg 25),

".. we know the exact spot where Leo Szilard got the idea that led to the atomic bomb.  There isn't even a plaque to mark it, but it happened in 1938, while he was waiting for a traffic light to change on London's Southampton Row.  Szilard had been remembering H. G. Well's old science-fiction novel about atomic power, The World Set Free and had been reading about the nuclear-fission experiment of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the lightbulb went on over his head."

Perhaps Soddy's name is appropriate for the formula if only for the unique way he presented his discovery. He presented it in the form of a poem which is presented below.

The Kiss Precise
by
Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.

To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.

If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.

Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four,
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_, June 20, 1936

One may notice in the last verse that Soddy generalizes the theorem to five spheres. The extended theorem becomes: \[ b_1^2+b_2^2+b_3^2+b_4^2+b_5^2 = \frac13(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4+b_5)^2. \]

Later   another verse was written by Thorold Gosset to describe the even more general   case in N dimensions for N+2 hyperspheres of the Nth dimension.

On August 15, 1936, only a few months after Soddy's poem had been published in Nature,  Gosset sent a copy of the poem to Donal Coxeter on the occasion of his wedding in the Round Church in Cambridge.  Gossett enclosed in his wedding congratulations, and his extension of the poem to the higher dimensions which were Coxeter's special area of study. It would be published in Nature the following year,
 

The Kiss Precise (Generalized) by Thorold Gosset

And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears,
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares -
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_
    January 9, 1937.

Fred Lunnon sent me a kind note correcting a typing oversight, and adding that

"The original result generalizes nicely to curved n-space with
curvature v [e.g. v^2 = +1 for elliptic space, -1 for hyperbolic]
in the form



        \((\sum_i x_i)^2 - n \sum_i x_i^2 = 2n v^2\)




where \(x_i\) denote the curvatures of n+2 mutually tangent spheres.
Example: n = 2, v = 0, x = [-1,2,2,3] is one solution, corresponding to
a unit circle in the plane enclosing circles of radii 1/2,1/2,1/3.



See Ivars Petersen "Circle Game" in Science News (2001) \bf 159 (16) p.254"

 

Fred admits he wasn't the first to prove this, but did manage to replicate it on his own (which impresses the heck out of me)... but THEN....... wait for it.... He wrote another poem verse to accompany this extension to higher dimensions...

  The Kiss Precise (Further Generalized) by Fred Lunnon



    How frightfully pedestrian

    My predecessors were

    To pose in space Euclidean

    Each fraternising sphere!

    Let Gauss' k squared be positive

    When space becomes elliptic,

    And conversely turn negative

    For spaces hyperbolic:

    Squared sum of bends is sum times n

    Of twice k squared plus squares of bends.

---

The Kiss Precise, Soddy's Circle Theorem

 Soddy's formula is another example of Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", so as to avoid this law about laws disobeying its very own decree.

Soddy's formula is about the relationship of the radii of four mutually tangent circles. The formula is sometimes called the "Kissing Circles Theorem". If four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must intersect at six distinct points. The first demonstration of this relationship between four mutually tangent circles (actually, one can be a line) was in 1643. Rene Descartes sent a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in which he showed that the four radii, r₁, r₂, r₃, r₄, must be such that \( \frac{1}{r^2_{1}}+ \frac{1}{r^2_{2}}+\frac{1}{r^2_3}+\frac{1}{r^2_4}= \frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{r_1}+\frac{1}{r_2}+\frac{1}{r_3}+\frac{1}{r_4} )^2\)

For this reason the theorem is often called Descarte's circle theorem. The figure shows four circles all externally tangent to each other, but could also be drawn with three tangent circles all inside, and tangent to, a fourth circle. The bend of this externally tangent circle is given a negative value, and thus the same equation provides its radius also.

The equation can be written much more easily, and usually is, using a notation of "bend". For each value let the "bend" equal the reciprocal of the radius, then \(\frac{1}{r_1} =b_1\)With this notation the formula can be written as \(b^2_1 + b^2_2+b^2_3+b^2_4=\frac{1}{2}(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4)^2\).

It seems that it may also have been discovered about the same time in Japan. In the book, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry, by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, there is an illustration of a complicated pattern of nested congruent circles, for which knowledge of the theorem would seem to be required, on a wooden tablet. It was a practice during the Edo period in Japan that people from every segment of society would inscribed geometry solutions on wooden tablets called sangaku and hang them as offerings in temples and shrines.
The Theorem was rediscovered and published in the 1841 The Lady's and Gentleman's diary by an amateur English Mathematician named Phillip Beecroft. Beecroft also observed that there exist four other circles that would each be mutually tangent at the same four points. These circles would have tangents perpendicular to the original circles tangents at each point of intersection. Both sets of Beecroft's circles are shown in this illustration from Mad Math.
Beecroft's circles are related to the use of a geometrical inversion in a circle which will invert the inner tangent circle to become an outer tangent circle. The circle of inversion between the two is the circle Beecroft uses that passes through the three points of tangent in the other three circles. (A nice explanation and illustration of this is at this AMS site.

In 1936 Sir Fredrick Soddy rediscovered the theorem again. Soddy may also be known to students of Science for receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for the discovery of the decay sequences of radioactive isotopes.  According to Oliver Sacks' wonderful book, Uncle Tungsten, Soddy also created the term "isotope" and was the first to use the term  "chain reaction".  In a strange "chain reaction" of ideas, Soddy played a part in the US developing an atomic bomb.  Soddy's book, The  Interpretation of Radium, inspired  H G Wells to write The World Set Free in 1914, and he dedicated the novel to Soddy's book. Twenty years later, Wells' book set Leo Szilard to thinking about the possibility of Chain reactions, and how they might be used to create a bomb, leading to his getting a British patent on the idea in 1936.  A few years later Szilard encouraged his friend, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb.  The prize-winning science-fiction writer, Frederik Pohl, talks about Szilard's epiphany in Chasing Science (pg 25),

".. we know the exact spot where Leo Szilard got the idea that led to the atomic bomb.  There isn't even a plaque to mark it, but it happened in 1938, while he was waiting for a traffic light to change on London's Southampton Row.  Szilard had been remembering H. G. Well's old science-fiction novel about atomic power, The World Set Free and had been reading about the nuclear-fission experiment of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the lightbulb went on over his head."

Perhaps Soddy's name is appropriate for the formula if only for the unique way he presented his discovery. He presented it in the form of a poem which is presented below.

The Kiss Precise
by
Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.

To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.

If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.

Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four,
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_, June 20, 1936

One may notice in the last verse that Soddy generalizes the theorem to five spheres. The extended theorem becomes: \[ b_1^2+b_2^2+b_3^2+b_4^2+b_5^2 = \frac13(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4+b_5)^2. \]

Later   another verse was written by Thorold Gosset to describe the even more general   case in N dimensions for N+2 hyperspheres of the Nth dimension.

On August 15, 1936, only a few months after Soddy's poem had been published in Nature,  Gosset sent a copy of the poem to Donal Coxeter on the occasion of his wedding in the Round Church in Cambridge.  Gossett enclosed in his wedding congratulations, and his extension of the poem to the higher dimensions which were Coxeter's special area of study. It would be published in Nature the following year,
 

The Kiss Precise (Generalized) by Thorold Gosset

And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears,
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares -
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_
    January 9, 1937.

Fred Lunnon sent me a kind note correcting a typing oversight, and adding that

"The original result generalizes nicely to curved n-space with
curvature v [e.g. v^2 = +1 for elliptic space, -1 for hyperbolic]
in the form



        \((\sum_i x_i)^2 - n \sum_i x_i^2 = 2n v^2\)




where \(x_i\) denote the curvatures of n+2 mutually tangent spheres.
Example: n = 2, v = 0, x = [-1,2,2,3] is one solution, corresponding to
a unit circle in the plane enclosing circles of radii 1/2,1/2,1/3.



See Ivars Petersen "Circle Game" in Science News (2001) \bf 159 (16) p.254"

 

Fred admits he wasn't the first to prove this, but did manage to replicate it on his own (which impresses the heck out of me)... but THEN....... wait for it.... He wrote another poem verse to accompany this extension to higher dimensions...

  The Kiss Precise (Further Generalized) by Fred Lunnon



    How frightfully pedestrian

    My predecessors were

    To pose in space Euclidean

    Each fraternising sphere!

    Let Gauss' k squared be positive

    When space becomes elliptic,

    And conversely turn negative

    For spaces hyperbolic:

    Squared sum of bends is sum times n

    Of twice k squared plus squares of bends.

---

The Kiss Precise, Soddy's Circle Theorem

 Soddy's formula is another example of Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law", so as to avoid this law about laws disobeying its very own decree.

Soddy's formula is about the relationship of the radii of four mutually tangent circles. The formula is sometimes called the "Kissing Circles Theorem". If four circles are all tangent to each other, then they must intersect at six distinct points. The first demonstration of this relationship between four mutually tangent circles (actually, one can be a line) was in 1643. Rene Descartes sent a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in which he showed that the four radii, r₁, r₂, r₃, r₄, must be such that \( \frac{1}{r^2_{1}}+ \frac{1}{r^2_{2}}+\frac{1}{r^2_3}+\frac{1}{r^2_4}= \frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{r_1}+\frac{1}{r_2}+\frac{1}{r_3}+\frac{1}{r_4} )^2\)

For this reason the theorem is often called Descarte's circle theorem. The figure shows four circles all externally tangent to each other, but could also be drawn with three tangent circles all inside, and tangent to, a fourth circle. The bend of this externally tangent circle is given a negative value, and thus the same equation provides its radius also.

The equation can be written much more easily, and usually is, using a notation of "bend". For each value let the "bend" equal the reciprocal of the radius, then \(\frac{1}{r_1} =b_1\)With this notation the formula can be written as \(b^2_1 + b^2_2+b^2_3+b^2_4=\frac{1}{2}(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4)^2\).

It seems that it may also have been discovered about the same time in Japan. In the book, Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry, by Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, there is an illustration of a complicated pattern of nested congruent circles, for which knowledge of the theorem would seem to be required, on a wooden tablet. It was a practice during the Edo period in Japan that people from every segment of society would inscribed geometry solutions on wooden tablets called sangaku and hang them as offerings in temples and shrines.
The Theorem was rediscovered and published in the 1841 The Lady's and Gentleman's diary by an amateur English Mathematician named Phillip Beecroft. Beecroft also observed that there exist four other circles that would each be mutually tangent at the same four points. These circles would have tangents perpendicular to the original circles tangents at each point of intersection. Both sets of Beecroft's circles are shown in this illustration from Mad Math.
Beecroft's circles are related to the use of a geometrical inversion in a circle which will invert the inner tangent circle to become an outer tangent circle. The circle of inversion between the two is the circle Beecroft uses that passes through the three points of tangent in the other three circles. (A nice explanation and illustration of this is at this AMS site.

In 1936 Sir Fredrick Soddy rediscovered the theorem again. Soddy may also be known to students of Science for receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for the discovery of the decay sequences of radioactive isotopes.  According to Oliver Sacks' wonderful book, Uncle Tungsten, Soddy also created the term "isotope" and was the first to use the term  "chain reaction".  In a strange "chain reaction" of ideas, Soddy played a part in the US developing an atomic bomb.  Soddy's book, The  Interpretation of Radium, inspired  H G Wells to write The World Set Free in 1914, and he dedicated the novel to Soddy's book. Twenty years later, Wells' book set Leo Szilard to thinking about the possibility of Chain reactions, and how they might be used to create a bomb, leading to his getting a British patent on the idea in 1936.  A few years later Szilard encouraged his friend, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb.  The prize-winning science-fiction writer, Frederik Pohl, talks about Szilard's epiphany in Chasing Science (pg 25),

".. we know the exact spot where Leo Szilard got the idea that led to the atomic bomb.  There isn't even a plaque to mark it, but it happened in 1938, while he was waiting for a traffic light to change on London's Southampton Row.  Szilard had been remembering H. G. Well's old science-fiction novel about atomic power, The World Set Free and had been reading about the nuclear-fission experiment of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the lightbulb went on over his head."

Perhaps Soddy's name is appropriate for the formula if only for the unique way he presented his discovery. He presented it in the form of a poem which is presented below.

The Kiss Precise
by
Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.

To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.

If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.

Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four,
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_, June 20, 1936

One may notice in the last verse that Soddy generalizes the theorem to five spheres. The extended theorem becomes: \[ b_1^2+b_2^2+b_3^2+b_4^2+b_5^2 = \frac13(b_1+b_2+b_3+b_4+b_5)^2. \]

Later   another verse was written by Thorold Gosset to describe the even more general   case in N dimensions for N+2 hyperspheres of the Nth dimension.

On August 15, 1936, only a few months after Soddy's poem had been published in Nature,  Gosset sent a copy of the poem to Donal Coxeter on the occasion of his wedding in the Round Church in Cambridge.  Gossett enclosed in his wedding congratulations, and his extension of the poem to the higher dimensions which were Coxeter's special area of study. It would be published in Nature the following year,
 

The Kiss Precise (Generalized) by Thorold Gosset

And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears,
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares -
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.

In _Nature_
    January 9, 1937.

Fred Lunnon sent me a kind note correcting a typing oversight, and adding that

"The original result generalizes nicely to curved n-space with
curvature v [e.g. v^2 = +1 for elliptic space, -1 for hyperbolic]
in the form



        \((\sum_i x_i)^2 - n \sum_i x_i^2 = 2n v^2\)




where \(x_i\) denote the curvatures of n+2 mutually tangent spheres.
Example: n = 2, v = 0, x = [-1,2,2,3] is one solution, corresponding to
a unit circle in the plane enclosing circles of radii 1/2,1/2,1/3.



See Ivars Petersen "Circle Game" in Science News (2001) \bf 159 (16) p.254"

 

Fred admits he wasn't the first to prove this, but did manage to replicate it on his own (which impresses the heck out of me)... but THEN....... wait for it.... He wrote another poem verse to accompany this extension to higher dimensions...

  The Kiss Precise (Further Generalized) by Fred Lunnon



    How frightfully pedestrian

    My predecessors were

    To pose in space Euclidean

    Each fraternising sphere!

    Let Gauss' k squared be positive

    When space becomes elliptic,

    And conversely turn negative

    For spaces hyperbolic:

    Squared sum of bends is sum times n

    Of twice k squared plus squares of bends.

---

On This Day in Math - Sep 22

Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

~Michael Faraday in his Laboratory Notebook

The 265th day of the year; 265 is !6 (sub-factorial 6), the number of ways that six ordered objects can be mis-ordered so that each is in the wrong spot. See Subfactorial

EVENTS
1602 In a public address at T¨ubingen University, Michael Mastlin, Kepler’s teacher, on the basis of chronological research put Jesus’ birth more than four years before the conventional date of A.D. 1. This date is now generally accepted. *VFR

---

1636 From a letter by Fermat to Roberval, it is clear that Fermat conceived the idea of analytic geometry as early as 1629, yet he published nothing on the subject. [Struik, Source Book, p. 397] *VFR

---

1792 This date is considered the beginning of the Republican Calendar of France, for on this date the Republic was proclaimed and this was also the date of the autumnal equinox in that year. The new calendar was not officially approved until 5 October 1793. *Cecil B. Read, “A book printed in the year VII,” The Mathematics Teacher, 59(1966), 138–140.

---

1822 “Jean-Fran¸coise Champollion the younger wrote his famous Lettre `a Monsieur Dacier, secr´etaire perp´etuel de l’Acad´`ero¬emie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, relative a l’alphabet des hi´glyphes phon´etiques. On that day he opened the great book of Ancient Egypt, sealed for some two thousand years and now at last decipherable.” Quoted from p. 15 of Tutankhamen (1963) by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt. *VFR

---

1986 In a decisive victory for the makers of a computer's insides, a federal judge ruled that code used to run computers and other electronic devices could be copyrighted like printed material.*CHM

---

BIRTHS
1711 Thomas Wright (22 September 1711 – 25 February 1786) was an English astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker, architect and garden designer. He was the first to describe the shape of the Milky Way and speculate that faint nebulae were distant galaxies.*Wik

---

1765 Paolo Ruffini born. He anticipated Abel by providing an almost correct proof of the insolubility of the quintic. *VFR Italian mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups. 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 (He also published the method now often called Horner's method ,,, see Horner below)

---

1769 Louis Puissant (22 Sept 1769, 10 Jan 1843) He is best remembered for his invention of a new map projection for a new map of France, and he was involved in the production of the map. The map was produced with considerable detail, the projection used spherical trigonometry, truncated power series and differential geometry. Puissant wrote on geodesy, the shape of the earth and spherical trigonometry. *SAU

---

1791 Michael Faraday born. (22 Sep 1791; 25 Aug 1867) English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly to the understanding of electromagnetism. Although one of the greatest experimentalists, he was largely self-educated. Appointed by Sir Humphry Davy as his assistant at the Royal Institution, Faraday initially concentrated on analytical chemistry, and discovered benzene in 1825. His most important work was in electromagnetism, in which field he demonstrated electromagnetic rotation and discovered electromagnetic induction (the key to the development of the electric dynamo and motor). He also discovered diamagnetism and the laws of electrolysis. He published pioneering papers that led to the practical use of electricity, and he advocated the use of electric light in lighthouses. *TIS

---

DEATHS
1703 Vincento Viviani died. His problem of cutting four congruent windows in a hemispherical cupolo so that the remainder was quadrable led to Euler’s development of the double integral. *VFR The leading geometer of his time, who founded the Accademia del Cimento. As one of the first important scientific societies, this organization came before England's Royal Society. In 1639, at age 17, he became the student, secretary and assistant of Galileo (now blind) in Arcetri, until Galileo died in 1642. During his long career, Viviani published a number of books on mathematical and scientific subjects. He edited the first edition of Galileo's collected works (1655-1656), and worked tirelessly to have his master's memory rehabilitated. In 1660, together with Borelli, he measured the velocity of sound by timing the difference between the flash and the sound of a cannon. They obtained the value of 350 metres per second. *TIS

---

1837 William George Horner (1786 – 22 September 1837) was a British mathematician and schoolmaster. The invention of the zoetrope, in 1834 and under a different name (Daedaleum), has been attributed to him. *Wik
Horner is largely remembered only for the method, Horner's method, of solving algebraic equations ascribed to him by Augustus De Morgan and others. He published on the subject in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1819, submitting his article on 1 July. But Fuller has pointed out that, contrary to De Morgan's assertion, this article does not contain the method, although one published by Horner in 1830 does. Fuller has found that Theophilus Holdred, a London watchmaker, did publish the method in 1820 and comments"At first sight, Horner's plagiarism seems like direct theft. However, he was apparently of an eccentric and obsessive nature ... Such a man could easily first persuade himself that a rival method was not greatly different from his own, and then, by degrees, come to believe that he himself had invented it. "
This discussion is somewhat moot because the method was anticipated in 19th century Europe by Paolo Ruffini (What a strange coincidence that he dies on Ruffini's birthdate) , but had, in any case, been considered by Zhu Shijie in China in the thirteenth century. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Horner's method had a prominent place in English and American textbooks on algebra. It is not unreasonable to ask why that should be. The answer lies simply with De Morgan who gave Horner's name and method wide coverage in many articles which he wrote.
Horner made other mathematical contributions, however, publishing a series of papers on transforming and solving algebraic equations, and he also applied similar techniques to functional equations. It is also worth noting that he gave a solution to what has come to be known as the "butterfly problem" which appeared in The Gentleman's Diary for 1815. The problem is the following:-
Let M be the midpoint of a chord PQ of a circle, through which two other chords AB and CD are drawn. Suppose AD cuts PQ at X and BC cuts PQ at Y. Prove that M is also the midpoint of XY.

The butterfly problem, whose name becomes clear on looking at the figure, has led to a wide range of interesting solutions. Finally we mention that Horner published Natural magic, a familiar exposition of a forgotten fact in optics (1832). *SAU

---

1922 Chen Ning Yang (22 Sep 1922, )Chinese-American theoretical physicist who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics (with Tsung-Dao Lee) for a ground-breaking theory that the weak force between elementary particles did not conserve parity, thus violating a previously accepted law of physics. (Parity holds that the laws of physics are the same in a right-handed system of coordinates as in a left-handed system.) The theory was subsequently confirmed experimentally by Chien-Shiung Wu in observations of beta decay. Yang is also known for his collaboration with Robert L. Mills. They developed the Yang-Mills fields theory - a mathematical idea for describing interactions among elementary particles and fields*TIS

---

1956 Frederick Soddy (2 Sep 1877, 22 Sep 1956). English chemist and physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for investigating radioactive substances. He suggested that different elements produced in different radioactive transformations were capable of occupying the same place on the Periodic Table, and on 18 Feb 1913 he named such species "isotopes" from Greek words meaning "same place." He is credited, along with others, with the discovery of the element protactinium in 1917 *TIS
Soddy is also the author of a mathematical poem about the solution to Descarte's four tangent circles theorem from the letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. The poem is called The Kiss Precise, and begins:

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

The complete poem and more about the history of the problem can be found here.

---

1970 Vojtěch Jarník (22 Dec 1897 , 22 Sept 1970) a Czech mathematician. His main area of work was in number theory and mathematical analysis; he proved a number of results on lattice point problems. He also developed the graph theory algorithm known as Prim's algorithm. The Vojtěch Jarník International Mathematical Competition, held each year in Ostrava, is named in his honor.*Wik

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1979 Charles Ehresmann (19 April 1905, 22 Sept 1979) He was one of the creators of differential topology. Beginning in 1941, Ehresmann made major contributions toward establishing the current view of fibre spaces, manifolds, foliations and jets. His work in the creation and development of fibre spaces followed on from the study of a special case made earlier by Seifert and Whitney.
After 1957 Ehresmann became a leader in category theory and he worked in this area for 20 years. His principal achievements in this area concern local categories and structures defined by atlases, and germs of categories. The article [3] contains a list of 139 articles written by Ehresmann during his productive career as well as listing several volumes which he edited. *SAU

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Credits
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*CHM=Computer History Museum

On This Day in Math - September 22

Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

~Michael Faraday in his Laboratory Notebook

The 265th day of the year; 265 is !6 (sub-factorial 6), the number of ways that six ordered objects can be mis-ordered so that each is in the wrong spot. See Subfactorial
The term "subfactorial "was introduced by Whitworth (1867 or 1878; Cajori 1993, p. 77). Euler (1809) calculated the first ten terms. For example, the only derangements of {1,2,3} are {2,3,1} and {3,1,2}, so !3=2


EVENTS
1602 In a public address at T¨ubingen University, Michael Mastlin, Kepler’s teacher, on the basis of chronological research put Jesus’ birth more than four years before the conventional date of A.D. 1. This date is now generally accepted. *VFR

---

1636 From a letter by Fermat to Roberval, it is clear that Fermat conceived the idea of analytic geometry as early as 1629, yet he published nothing on the subject. [Struik, Source Book, p. 397] *VFR

---

1792 This date is considered the beginning of the Republican Calendar of France, for on this date the Republic was proclaimed and this was also the date of the autumnal equinox in that year. The new calendar was not officially approved until 5 October 1793. *Cecil B. Read, “A book printed in the year VII,” The Mathematics Teacher, 59(1966), 138–140.

---

1822 “Jean-Francoise Champollion the younger wrote his famous Lettre `a Monsieur Dacier, secr´etaire perp´etuel de l’Acad´`ero¬emie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, relative a l’alphabet des hi´glyphes phon´etiques. On that day he opened the great book of Ancient Egypt, sealed for some two thousand years and now at last decipherable.” Quoted from p. 15 of Tutankhamen (1963) by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt. *VFR

---

1986 In a decisive victory for the makers of a computer's insides, a federal judge ruled that code used to run computers and other electronic devices could be copyrighted like printed material.*CHM

---

BIRTHS
1711 Thomas Wright (22 September 1711 – 25 February 1786) was an English astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker, architect and garden designer. He was the first to describe the shape of the Milky Way and speculate that faint nebulae were distant galaxies.
Wright is best known for his publication An original theory or new hypothesis of the Universe (1750), in which he explains the appearance of the Milky Way as "an optical effect due to our immersion in what locally approximates to a flat layer of stars."
Another of Thomas Wright's ideas, which is often attributed to Kant, was that many faint nebulae are actually incredibly distant galaxies.*Wik

---

1765 Paolo Ruffini born. He anticipated Abel by providing an almost correct proof of the insolubility of the quintic. *VFR Italian mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups. 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 (He also published the method now often called Horner's method ,,, see Horner below)

---

1769 Louis Puissant (22 Sept 1769, 10 Jan 1843) He is best remembered for his invention of a new map projection for a new map of France, and he was involved in the production of the map. The map was produced with considerable detail, the projection used spherical trigonometry, truncated power series and differential geometry. Puissant wrote on geodesy, the shape of the earth and spherical trigonometry. *SAU

---

1791 Michael Faraday born. (22 Sep 1791; 25 Aug 1867) English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly to the understanding of electromagnetism. Although one of the greatest experimentalists, he was largely self-educated. Appointed by Sir Humphry Davy as his assistant at the Royal Institution, Faraday initially concentrated on analytical chemistry, and discovered benzene in 1825. His most important work was in electromagnetism, in which field he demonstrated electromagnetic rotation and discovered electromagnetic induction (the key to the development of the electric dynamo and motor). He also discovered diamagnetism and the laws of electrolysis. He published pioneering papers that led to the practical use of electricity, and he advocated the use of electric light in lighthouses. *TIS

---

DEATHS
1703 Vincento Viviani died. His problem of cutting four congruent windows in a hemispherical cupolo so that the remainder was quadrable led to Euler’s development of the double integral. *VFR The leading geometer of his time, who founded the Accademia del Cimento. As one of the first important scientific societies, this organization came before England's Royal Society. In 1639, at age 17, he became the student, secretary and assistant of Galileo (now blind) in Arcetri, until Galileo died in 1642. During his long career, Viviani published a number of books on mathematical and scientific subjects. He edited the first edition of Galileo's collected works (1655-1656), and worked tirelessly to have his master's memory rehabilitated. In 1660, together with Borelli, he measured the velocity of sound by timing the difference between the flash and the sound of a cannon. They obtained the value of 350 metres per second. *TIS

---

1837 William George Horner (1786 – 22 September 1837) was a British mathematician and schoolmaster. The invention of the zoetrope, in 1834 and under a different name (Daedaleum), has been attributed to him. *Wik
Horner is largely remembered only for the method, Horner's method, of solving algebraic equations ascribed to him by Augustus De Morgan and others. He published on the subject in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1819, submitting his article on 1 July. But Fuller has pointed out that, contrary to De Morgan's assertion, this article does not contain the method, although one published by Horner in 1830 does. Fuller has found that Theophilus Holdred, a London watchmaker, did publish the method in 1820 and comments"At first sight, Horner's plagiarism seems like direct theft. However, he was apparently of an eccentric and obsessive nature ... Such a man could easily first persuade himself that a rival method was not greatly different from his own, and then, by degrees, come to believe that he himself had invented it. "
This discussion is somewhat moot because the method was anticipated in 19th century Europe by Paolo Ruffini (What a strange coincidence that he dies on Ruffini's birthdate) , but had, in any case, been considered by Zhu Shijie in China in the thirteenth century. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Horner's method had a prominent place in English and American textbooks on algebra. It is not unreasonable to ask why that should be. The answer lies simply with De Morgan who gave Horner's name and method wide coverage in many articles which he wrote.
Horner made other mathematical contributions, however, publishing a series of papers on transforming and solving algebraic equations, and he also applied similar techniques to functional equations. It is also worth noting that he gave a solution to what has come to be known as the "butterfly problem" which appeared in The Gentleman's Diary for 1815. The problem is the following:-
Let M be the midpoint of a chord PQ of a circle, through which two other chords AB and CD are drawn. Suppose AD cuts PQ at X and BC cuts PQ at Y. Prove that M is also the midpoint of XY.

The butterfly problem, whose name becomes clear on looking at the figure, has led to a wide range of interesting solutions. Finally we mention that Horner published Natural magic, a familiar exposition of a forgotten fact in optics (1832). *SAU

---

1922 Chen Ning Yang (22 Sep 1922, )Chinese-American theoretical physicist who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics (with Tsung-Dao Lee) for a ground-breaking theory that the weak force between elementary particles did not conserve parity, thus violating a previously accepted law of physics. (Parity holds that the laws of physics are the same in a right-handed system of coordinates as in a left-handed system.) The theory was subsequently confirmed experimentally by Chien-Shiung Wu in observations of beta decay. Yang is also known for his collaboration with Robert L. Mills. They developed the Yang-Mills fields theory - a mathematical idea for describing interactions among elementary particles and fields*TIS

---

1956 Frederick Soddy (2 Sep 1877, 22 Sep 1956). English chemist and physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for investigating radioactive substances. He suggested that different elements produced in different radioactive transformations were capable of occupying the same place on the Periodic Table, and on 18 Feb 1913 he named such species "isotopes" from Greek words meaning "same place." He is credited, along with others, with the discovery of the element protactinium in 1917 *TIS
Soddy is also the author of a mathematical poem about the solution to Descarte's four tangent circles theorem from the letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. The poem is called The Kiss Precise, and begins:

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

The complete poem and more about the history of the problem can be found here.

---

1970 Vojtěch Jarník (22 Dec 1897 , 22 Sept 1970) a Czech mathematician. His main area of work was in number theory and mathematical analysis; he proved a number of results on lattice point problems. He also developed the graph theory algorithm known as Prim's algorithm. The Vojtěch Jarník International Mathematical Competition, held each year in Ostrava, is named in his honor.*Wik

---

1979 Charles Ehresmann (19 April 1905, 22 Sept 1979) He was one of the creators of differential topology. Beginning in 1941, Ehresmann made major contributions toward establishing the current view of fibre spaces, manifolds, foliations and jets. His work in the creation and development of fibre spaces followed on from the study of a special case made earlier by Seifert and Whitney.
After 1957 Ehresmann became a leader in category theory and he worked in this area for 20 years. His principal achievements in this area concern local categories and structures defined by atlases, and germs of categories. The article [3] contains a list of 139 articles written by Ehresmann during his productive career as well as listing several volumes which he edited. *SAU

---

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

On This Day in Math - September 22

Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

~Michael Faraday in his Laboratory Notebook

The 266th day of the year; 266 can be expressed as 222 in base 11.

266 is the sum of four cubes,  \(266 = 2^3 + 2^3 + 5^3 + 5^3 \) It is also the index of the largest proper subgroups of the sporadic group known as the Janko group J₁ 

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EVENTS
1602 In a public address at T¨ubingen University, Michael Mastlin, Kepler’s teacher, on the basis of chronological research put Jesus’ birth more than four years before the conventional date of A.D. 1. This date is now generally accepted. *VFR

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1636 From a letter by Fermat to Roberval, it is clear that Fermat conceived the idea of analytic geometry as early as 1629, yet he published nothing on the subject. [Struik, Source Book, p. 397] *VFR  In the same letter he found the first new pair of amicable numbers since the early Greeks found 220 & 284. Fermat's pair was 17296 & 18416. Two numbers are called amicable, if the sum of the aliquot divisors of each, sums to the other. *L E Dickson, History of Theory of Numbers

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1792 This date is considered the beginning of the Republican Calendar of France, for on this date the Republic was proclaimed and this was also the date of the autumnal equinox in that year. The new calendar was not officially approved until 5 October 1793. *Cecil B. Read, “A book printed in the year VII,” The Mathematics Teacher, 59(1966), 138–140.

---

1822 “Jean-Francoise Champollion the younger wrote his famous Lettre `a Monsieur Dacier, secr´etaire perp´etuel de l’Acad´`ero¬emie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, relative a l’alphabet des hi´glyphes phon´etiques. On that day he opened the great book of Ancient Egypt, sealed for some two thousand years and now at last decipherable.” Quoted from p. 15 of Tutankhamen (1963) by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt. *VFR

---

1986 In a decisive victory for the makers of a computer's insides, a federal judge ruled that code used to run computers and other electronic devices could be copyrighted like printed material.*CHM

---

2006 Britney Crystal Gallivan of Pomona, California was a keynote speaker at the September 22, 2006 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics convention. As a Junior in high school in 2002 she had disproved a commonly held mathematical myth that a piece of paper could not be folded more than eight times. Gallivan demonstrated that a single piece of toilet paper 4000 ft in length can be folded in half twelve times. Not only did she provide the empirical proof, but she also derived an equation that yielded the width of paper or length of paper necessary to fold a piece of paper of thickness t any n number of times. Wik

---

BIRTHS
1711 Thomas Wright (22 September 1711 – 25 February 1786) was an English astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker, architect and garden designer. He was the first to describe the shape of the Milky Way and speculate that faint nebulae were distant galaxies.
Wright is best known for his publication An original theory or new hypothesis of the Universe (1750), in which he explains the appearance of the Milky Way as "an optical effect due to our immersion in what locally approximates to a flat layer of stars."
Another of Thomas Wright's ideas, which is often attributed to Kant, was that many faint nebulae are actually incredibly distant galaxies.*Wik

---

1765 Paolo Ruffini born. He anticipated Abel by providing an almost correct proof of the insolubility of the quintic. *VFR Italian mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups. 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 (He also published the method now often called Horner's method ,,, see Horner below)

---

1769 Louis Puissant (22 Sept 1769, 10 Jan 1843) He is best remembered for his invention of a new map projection for a new map of France, and he was involved in the production of the map. The map was produced with considerable detail, the projection used spherical trigonometry, truncated power series and differential geometry. Puissant wrote on geodesy, the shape of the earth and spherical trigonometry. *SAU

---

1791 Michael Faraday born. (22 Sep 1791; 25 Aug 1867) English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly to the understanding of electromagnetism. Although one of the greatest experimentalists, he was largely self-educated. Appointed by Sir Humphry Davy as his assistant at the Royal Institution, Faraday initially concentrated on analytical chemistry, and discovered benzene in 1825. His most important work was in electromagnetism, in which field he demonstrated electromagnetic rotation and discovered electromagnetic induction (the key to the development of the electric dynamo and motor). He also discovered diamagnetism and the laws of electrolysis. He published pioneering papers that led to the practical use of electricity, and he advocated the use of electric light in lighthouses. *TIS

---

DEATHS
1703 Vincento Viviani died. His problem of cutting four congruent windows in a hemispherical cupolo so that the remainder was quadrable led to Euler’s development of the double integral. *VFR The leading geometer of his time, who founded the Accademia del Cimento. As one of the first important scientific societies, this organization came before England's Royal Society. In 1639, at age 17, he became the student, secretary and assistant of Galileo (now blind) in Arcetri, until Galileo died in 1642. During his long career, Viviani published a number of books on mathematical and scientific subjects. He edited the first edition of Galileo's collected works (1655-1656), and worked tirelessly to have his master's memory rehabilitated. In 1660, together with Borelli, he measured the velocity of sound by timing the difference between the flash and the sound of a cannon. They obtained the value of 350 metres per second. *TIS

---

1837 William George Horner (1786 – 22 September 1837) was a British mathematician and schoolmaster. The invention of the zoetrope, in 1834 and under a different name (Daedaleum), has been attributed to him. *Wik
Horner is largely remembered only for the method, Horner's method, of solving algebraic equations ascribed to him by Augustus De Morgan and others. He published on the subject in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1819, submitting his article on 1 July. But Fuller has pointed out that, contrary to De Morgan's assertion, this article does not contain the method, although one published by Horner in 1830 does. Fuller has found that Theophilus Holdred, a London watchmaker, did publish the method in 1820 and comments"At first sight, Horner's plagiarism seems like direct theft. However, he was apparently of an eccentric and obsessive nature ... Such a man could easily first persuade himself that a rival method was not greatly different from his own, and then, by degrees, come to believe that he himself had invented it. "
This discussion is somewhat moot because the method was anticipated in 19th century Europe by Paolo Ruffini (What a strange coincidence that he dies on Ruffini's birthdate) , but had, in any case, been considered by Zhu Shijie in China in the thirteenth century. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Horner's method had a prominent place in English and American textbooks on algebra. It is not unreasonable to ask why that should be. The answer lies simply with De Morgan who gave Horner's name and method wide coverage in many articles which he wrote.
Horner made other mathematical contributions, however, publishing a series of papers on transforming and solving algebraic equations, and he also applied similar techniques to functional equations. It is also worth noting that he gave a solution to what has come to be known as the "butterfly problem" which appeared in The Gentleman's Diary for 1815. The problem is the following:-
Let M be the midpoint of a chord PQ of a circle, through which two other chords AB and CD are drawn. Suppose AD cuts PQ at X and BC cuts PQ at Y. Prove that M is also the midpoint of XY.

The butterfly problem, whose name becomes clear on looking at the figure, has led to a wide range of interesting solutions. Finally we mention that Horner published Natural magic, a familiar exposition of a forgotten fact in optics (1832). *SAU

---

1922 Chen Ning Yang (22 Sep 1922, )Chinese-American theoretical physicist who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics (with Tsung-Dao Lee) for a ground-breaking theory that the weak force between elementary particles did not conserve parity, thus violating a previously accepted law of physics. (Parity holds that the laws of physics are the same in a right-handed system of coordinates as in a left-handed system.) The theory was subsequently confirmed experimentally by Chien-Shiung Wu in observations of beta decay. Yang is also known for his collaboration with Robert L. Mills. They developed the Yang-Mills fields theory - a mathematical idea for describing interactions among elementary particles and fields*TIS

---

1956 Frederick Soddy (2 Sep 1877, 22 Sep 1956). English chemist and physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for investigating radioactive substances. He suggested that different elements produced in different radioactive transformations were capable of occupying the same place on the Periodic Table, and on 18 Feb 1913 he named such species "isotopes" from Greek words meaning "same place." He is credited, along with others, with the discovery of the element protactinium in 1917 *TIS
Soddy is also the author of a mathematical poem about the solution to Descarte's four tangent circles theorem from the letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. The poem is called The Kiss Precise, and begins:

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

The complete poem and more about the history of the problem can be found here.

---

1970 Vojtěch Jarník (22 Dec 1897 , 22 Sept 1970) a Czech mathematician. His main area of work was in number theory and mathematical analysis; he proved a number of results on lattice point problems. He also developed the graph theory algorithm known as Prim's algorithm. The Vojtěch Jarník International Mathematical Competition, held each year in Ostrava, is named in his honor.*Wik

---

1979 Charles Ehresmann (19 April 1905, 22 Sept 1979) He was one of the creators of differential topology. Beginning in 1941, Ehresmann made major contributions toward establishing the current view of fibre spaces, manifolds, foliations and jets. His work in the creation and development of fibre spaces followed on from the study of a special case made earlier by Seifert and Whitney.
After 1957 Ehresmann became a leader in category theory and he worked in this area for 20 years. His principal achievements in this area concern local categories and structures defined by atlases, and germs of categories. The article [3] contains a list of 139 articles written by Ehresmann during his productive career as well as listing several volumes which he edited. *SAU

---

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