~Simon Newcomb
The 192nd day of the year; 192 is the smallest number that together with its double and triple contain every digit from 1-9 exactly once. There are three other values of n so that n, 2n, and 3n contain each non-zero digit exactly once. Can you find them?
192 is the sum of ten consecutive primes (5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37)
192 is the number of edges on a 6th dimension hypercube, it is the last day of the year which is the number of edges of a hypercube.
192 is a Happy number, summing the square of its digits and iterating leads to 1 in only three iterations. Its also a Hashard (Joy-giver) number, divisible by the sum of it's digits, 12.
Diophantus probably knew, and Lagrange proved, that every positive integer can be written as a sum of four perfect squares. Jacobi proved the stronger result that the number of ways in which a positive integer can be so written equals 8 times the sum of its divisors that are not multiples of 4. Use this theorem to prove that there are 192 ways to express 14 as a sum of four squares.
See More Math Facts for every year date here
1663 John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, gave a specious proof of Euclid’s parallel postulate. See W. W. Rouse Ball, Mathematical Recreations and Essays, 6th edition, pp. 314– 315.*VFR
1686 Leibniz published his first paper on the integral calculus in Acta eruditorum.*VFR This paper contains the first appearance in print of the elongated s integral notation used today. He had used the symbol earlier in a manuscript on Oct 29, 1675.
"Utile erit scribi
pro omnia, ut l = omn. l, id est summa ipsorum l. [It will be useful to write for omn. so that l = omn. l, or the sum of all the l's.] *SAU
1699 Halley's final log entry for his first voyage of discovery commanding the Paramore, “The Gunns and Gunners Stores were delivered to the Tower Officers and that Same Evening we moord our Shipp at Deptford”
Halley was paid wages of £168 0s 0d, less deductions for the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich and for “bearing Supernumery’s”, leaving net pay of £140 2s 8d. Lieutenant Edward Harrison received £71 5s 2d (£71 0s 0d net), and the clerk Caleb Harmon was paid £15 19s 3d (£15 3s 1d net), which his father apparently collected. Harrison was a ‘tarpaulin’, a man of sea-breeding, who rose to become a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He is known to have been at sea by 1688, probably in the merchant service, and may have been ‘using the sea’ somewhat earlier.
He was first commissioned as a Royal Navy lieutenant on 16 February 1691
*halleyslog.wordpress.com
1700 Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences at Berlin founded. Leibniz was primarily responsible for the founding and directed it for sixteen years. [HM 2, p. 310; American Journal of Physics, 34(1966), p. 22]*VFR
1731 Alexis-Claude Clairaut elected to the French academy. He was only eighteen. *VFR
1738 Isaac Greenwood, the first Hollis Professor at Harvard, was “ejected” from his chair for drunkenness. [I. B. Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science, p. 36.] *VFR
Greenwood travelled to London, where he lodged with John Theophilus Desaguliers and attended his lectures on Newtonian Experimental Philosophy. He later introduced the subject in the American Colonies and his book An Experimental Course of Mechanical Philosophy, published in Boston in 1726, owed much to Desaguliers. In London Greenwood met with Thomas Hollis, who wished to endow a chair at Harvard College for him. Hollis later fell out with Greenwood, over his financial imprudence. However, back in Boston, Greenwood was eventually appointed to the new Hollis Chair in 1727.
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.
After he was removed from the chair for intemperance in 1737. Unable to support his family, he joined the Royal Navy as a chaplain aboard HMS Rose in 1742, transferring to HMS Aldborough in 1744. He was released from service in Charleston, South Carolina, on 22 May 1744 and died from the effects of alcohol on 22 October 1745. *Wik
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1747 Benjamin Franklin writes to Peter Collinson, London Businessman and member of the Royal Society, to describe the, "wonderful effects of pointed bodies, both in drawing off and throwing off the electrical fire."* A history of physics in its elementary branches By Florian Cajori
Collinson showed Franklin’s letters to friends, read some of them to the Royal Society, and allowed copies to be made. He decided, late in 1750, to publish them, and they appeared in April 1751 with the title Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin, and Communicated in several Letters to Mr. P. Collinson, of London, F.R.S., a thin pamphlet of 86 numbered pages, which included corrections and additions supplied by Franklin
The book outlines the existence of positive and negative charges, and the difference between insulators and conductors. A list of electrical terms Franklin coined, *Fermat's Library
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| *Abe Books |
1801, French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons (24 Sep 1761 - 14 Oct 1831) discovers his first comet. In his lifetime he discovered or co-discovered up to 37 comets. Since 1789, when he got a post at the Observatory at Marseilles as concierge, Pons quickly learned how to make observations with the instruments. He had a remarkable ability to remember the star fields he observed and to recognize changes. He logged his first discovery of a comet on 11 July 1801, which he had to share with Messier who found it a day later. Interestingly, as Pons' made his first comet discovery, that comet was Messier's last. Almost once every year, thereafter until 1827 when his eyesight declined, Pons found a new comet. Jean-Louis Pons set the record for visual discoveries of comets by an individual. *TiS
1811 Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro published his memoire about the molecular content of gases. *TIS
Avogadro wrote a memoria (concise note) in which he described the experimental gas law that now bears his name. He sent this memoria to De Lamétherie's Journal de Physique, de Chemie et d'Histoire naturelle, and it was published in the July 14, 1811 issue
1814 Amp`ere submitted a paper on general solutions of differential equations. It contains thought-provoking remarks and interesting examples which had to wait several decades for proper understanding and recognition. [Ivor Grattan-Guiness, Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800– 1840, pp. 700ff, 1389]*VFR
The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him. His name is also one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. The term kinematic is the English version of his cinématique, which he constructed from the Greek κίνημα kinema ("movement, motion"), itself derived from κινεῖν kinein ("to move"). *Wik
1859 The Current Big Ben (the bell) is first heard ringing in the Westminster clock tower. Why Big Ben? After Benjamin Hall (1802-67). In Aug 1856 the bell, with Hall's name inscribed on it, was cast, but cracked after tests in October 1857. The substitute was also defective but worked sufficiently well to be hung in Oct 1858. Named Big Ben, it was first heard on 11 July 1859. Two months later it too cracked & fell silent for 4 years; it was repaired with help of Sir George Airy, astronomer royal, & rings to this day. *Oxford DNB@ODNB
Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster, at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London, England, and the name is frequently extended to refer also to the clock and the clock tower. The official name of the tower in which Big Ben is located was originally the Clock Tower, but it was renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II.*Wik
The second "Big Ben" (center) and the Quarter Bells from The Illustrated News of the World, 4 December 1858
1925 On July 11,1925, in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg revealed his new ideas, which were to revolutionise physics. The letter, preserved in the Wolfgang Pauli Archive at CERN, reveals Heisenberg’s efforts to liberate physics from the semi-classical picture of atoms as planetary systems, with electrons in orbit around the nucleus.
“All of my pitiful efforts are directed at completely killing off the concept of orbits – which, after all, cannot be observed—and replacing it with something more suitable,” he explains in his letter to Pauli.
In the picture, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Fermi (left to right) take a break by Lake Como during the 1927 International Congress of Physicists. *Cern
1962 Aerospace engineer John C. Houbolt, the leading proponent of the lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) plan (chosen #OTD in 1962) which made possible John F. Kennedy's goal of sending astronauts to the Moon and bringing them back home safely before the end of the 1960 @NASA History
1976 K&E produced its last slide rule, which it presented to the Smithsonian Institution. A common method of performing mathematical calculations for many years, the slide rule became obsolete with the invention of the computer and its smaller, hand-held sibling, the calculator. (*This Day in History-Computer History Museum)
A 1930s high school class making electrical calculations on their slide rules. Note the demonstration-sized rule hanging on the blackboard. Keuffel & Esser Co., Drawing Instruments and Materials for High Schools, Preparatory Schools and Manual Training Schools (Hoboken, N.J., 1936), 62. NMAH Trade Literature Collection, Smithsonian Institution Libraries. (My personal history research on slide rules suggests that few highschools used slide rules in HS math, but a few did use them as early as the twenties in science classes.
1979 U.S. space station, Skylab, re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. It disintegrated, spreading fragments across the southeastern Indian Ocean and over a sparsely populated section of western Australia, where a cow died after being struck by a piece of falling debris. *TIS (Proving the potential effectiveness of weapons in space?)
The do-it-yourself Skylab Protective Helmet promised users it would “do you absolutely no good at all!” JEFFREY HALL
A cattle rancher found this chunk of Skylab more than a decade after the space station reentered Earth’s atmosphere on 12 July 1979. PHOTO: RYAN HERNANDEZ; OBJECT: POWERHOUSE COLLECTION
In 1991, a solar eclipse cast a blanket of darkness stretching 9,000 miles from Hawaii to South America, lasting nearly seven minutes in some places. It was the so-called eclipse of the century. A total solar eclipse - the moon passing between the sun and the earth - is the moon casting its shadow on the earth's surface. Total eclipses occur almost once per year, but are often over an ocean or remote countries. The solar eclipse on July 11, 1991, was a thrill for scientists. It traveled over the several astronomical observatories on the top of Mauna Kea. Their 14,000 feet elevation was actually above the cloud level, which obstructed the view for those below. *TIS
2000 The da Vinci robot surgical system was the first to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in gallbladder, gastroesophageal reflux, and gynecologic operations. The advanced medical device was an offshoot of robotic technology developed by the U.S. Dept of Defense for military applications. In the 1990s, Intuitive Surgical, Inc. and Computer Motion (which merged in 2000) developed robotic interfaces for use in human surgical applications. A three- or four-armed robot, manipulates instruments with precise wrist-like dexterity, remotely controlled by the surgeon from a computer console. Instruments and cameras are guided through quite small openings in the body, which is much less invasive than previous methods, enabling earlier release from hospital and more rapid healing. *TiS
2011 this day was about "one year" after, German astronomer Johanne Galle discovered Neptune ... One Neptunian year that is! *rmathematicus, Thony Christie;
On July 11, 2011, Neptune completed its first full barycentric orbit since its discovery on September 23, 1846, *Wik
1732 Joseph Jérôme Le Français de Lalande, (11 July 1732 – 4 April 1807) was a an astronomer, born in Bourg-en-Bresse, France. He determined the Moon's parallax from Berlin for the French Academy (1751). He was appointed professor of Astronomy, Collège de France (1762), and subsequently, director of the Paris Observatory. He published his Traité d'astronomie in 1764 - tables of the planetary positions that were considered the best available for the rest of the century. In 1801 he also published a comprehensive star catalogue. He died in 1807, apparently of tuberculosis. *TIS
Thony Christie began an article about Lalande with this nice intro, "The cliché concept of a Frenchman is of the prime example of a chauvinist and the eighteenth century is not renowned as a period of equality for women, so it might come as somewhat of a surprise that an eighteenth century Frenchman very much championed the positive role of women in astronomy; that man was Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande (1732–1807)." The remainder is equally informative and entertaining.
1811 Sir William Robert Grove, (11 July 1811 – 1 August 1896) British physicist and a justice of Britain's high court (from 1880), who first offered proof of the thermal dissociation of atoms within a molecule. He showed that steam in contact with a strongly heated platinum wire is decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen in a reversible reaction. In 1839, Grove mixed hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of an electrolyte, and produced electricity and water. This Grove Cell was the invention of the fuel cell. The technology was not seriously revisited until the1960s. Through the electrochemical process, the energy stored in a fuel is converted - without combusting fuel - directly into DC electricity.*TIS
1857 Sir Joseph Larmor (11 July 1857 Magheragall, County Antrim, Ireland – 19 May 1942 Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland), Irish physicist, the first to calculate the rate at which energy is radiated by an accelerated electron, and the first to explain the splitting of spectrum lines by a magnetic field. His theories were based on the belief that matter consists entirely of electric particles moving in the ether. His elaborate mathematical electrical theory of the late 1890s included the "electron" as a rotational strain (a sort of twist) in the ether. But Larmor's theory did not describe the electron as a part of the atom. Many physicists envisioned both material particles and electromagnetic forces as structures and strains in that hypothetical fluid. *TIS
1857 Alfred Binet (July 11, 1857 – October 18, 1911) who introduced his famous IQ test in 1905. *VFR French experimental psychologist, the director of the psychological laboratory of the Sorbonne, Paris (1894). He made fundamental contributions to the measurement of intelligence.With Theodore Simon, Binet produced a series of graded tasks typical of the intellectual development of children of different ages (1905). This scale was extended (1908-11), and the tasks were assigned to the age level at which average children could manage them. Thus children could be scored for the level, or mental age, they reached. This test formed the basis for the Stanford-Binet Tests.*TIS (today in Science also gives Binet's birthdate on July 11th, with a different description: French psychologist who was a pioneer in the field of intelligence testing of the normal mind. He took a different approach than most psychologists of his day: he was interested in the workings of the normal mind rather than the pathology of mental illness. He wanted to find a way to measure the ability to think and reason, apart from education in any particular field. In 1905 he developed a test in which he had children do tasks such as follow commands, copy patterns, name objects, and put things in order or arrange them properly. He gave the test to Paris schoolchildren and created a standard based on his data. From Binet's work, "IQ" (intelligence quotient), entered the vocabulary. The IQ is the ratio of "mental age" to chronological age, with 100 being average.)
1890 Giacomo Albanese (11 July 1890 – 8 June 1947) was an Italian mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry. He took a permanent position in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1936. *Wik
1902 Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (The Hague, July 11, 1902 — Reno, December 4, 1978) Dutch-born U.S. physicist who, with George E. Uhlenbeck, a fellow graduate student at the University of Leiden, Neth., formulated (1925) the concept of electron spin. It led to recognition that spin was a property of protons, neutrons, and most elementary particles and to a fundamental change in the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. Goudsmit also made the first measurement of nuclear spin and its Zeeman effect with Ernst Back (1926-27), developed a theory of hyperfine structure of spectral lines, made the first spectroscopic determination of nuclear magnetic moments (1931-33), contributed to the theory of complex atoms and the theory of multiple scattering of electrons, and invented the magnetic time-of-flight mass spectrometer (1948).*TIS
1907Helmut Grunsky (11 July 1904 – 5 June 1986) was a German mathematician who worked in complex analysis and geometric function theory. He introduced Grunsky's theorem and the Grunsky inequalities.
In 1936, he was appointed editor of Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik. In 1939 he was forced to leave this position after Ludwig Bieberbach accused him of employing Jewish referees in a notorious letter.[Bieberbach was enthusiastically involved in the efforts to dismiss his Jewish colleagues, including Edmund Landau and his former coauthor Issai Schur, from their posts. He also facilitated the Gestapo arrests of some close colleagues, such as Juliusz Schauder. ]
Grunsky joined the Nazi Party on 1 April 1940, though he seems to have had little sympathy with its philosophy. He published in the journal Deutsche Mathematik. From 1949 he was Privatdozent at the University of Tübingen; later, he was professor at the University of Mainz and at the University of Würzburg *Wik
1916 Alexander Mikhailovich Prokhorov (born Alexander Michael Prochoroff, Russian: Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович Про́хоров; 11 July 1916 – 8 January 2002) is the Soviet physicist who received, (with Nikolay G. Basov, USSR and Charles H. Townes, US), the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1964 "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle." "Maser" stands for "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." An amplification can occur only if the stimulated emission is larger than the absorption, requiring that there should be more atoms in a high energy state than in a lower one. This state is called an inverted population. Prokhorov had researched the maser independently but simultaneously with the other prize recipients. *TiS
1922 John William Scott Cassels (11 July 1922 – 27 July 2015) initially worked on elliptic curves. After a period when he worked on geometry of numbers and diophantine approximation, he returned in the later 1950s to the arithmetic of elliptic curves, writing a series of papers connecting the Selmer group with Galois cohomology and laying some of the foundations of the modern theory of infinite descent. His best-known single result may be the proof that the Tate-Shafarevich group, if it is finite, must have order that is a square; the proof being by construction of an alternating form. Cassels has often studied individual Diophantine equations by algebraic number theory and p-adic methods.
His publications include 200 papers. His advanced textbooks have influenced generations of mathematicians; some of Cassels's books have remained in print for decades. *Wik
1927 Theodore Harold Maiman (July 11, 1927 – May 5, 2007) Theodore Harold Maiman was an American physicist who built the first working laser. He began working with electronic devices in his teens, while earning college money by repairing electrical appliances and radios. In the 1960s, he developed, demonstrated, and patented a laser using a pink ruby medium. The laser is a device that produces monochromatic coherent light (light in which the rays are all of the same wavelength and phase). The laser has since been applied in a very wide range of uses, including eye surgery, dentistry, range-finding, manufacturing, even measuring the distance between the Earth and the Moon.*TiS
Maiman with his laser in July 1960.
1382 Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–5 – July 11, 1382), was a French mathematician who invented coordinate geometry long before Descartes. He was the first to use a fractional exponent and also worked on infinite series. *SAU
Oresme was Bishop of Liseux and died there, and was buried in the cathedral church there, says New World Encyclopedia. I was recently (2011) at the Cathedral and cold find no mark of his life there.
"His most important contributions to mathematics are contained in "Tractatus de figuratione potentiarum et mensurarum difformitatum", still in manuscript. An abridgment of this work printed as "Tractatus de latitudinibus formarum" (1482, 1486, 1505, 1515), has heretofore been the only source for the study of his mathematical ideas. In a quality, or accidental form, such as heat, the Scholastics distinguished the intensio (the degree of heat at each point) and the extensio (e.g., the length of the heated rod): these two terms were often replaced by latitudo and longitudo, and from the time of St. Thomas until far on in the fourteenth century, there was lively debate on the latitudo formæ. For the sake of lucidity, Oresme conceived the idea of employing what we should now call rectangular co-ordinates: in modern terminology, a length proportionate to the longitudo was the abscissa at a given point, and a perpendicular at that point, proportional to the latitudo, was the ordinate. He shows that a geometrical property of such a figure could be regarded as corresponding to a property of the form itself only when this property remains constant while the units measuring the longitudo and latitudo vary. Hence he defines latitudo uniformis as that which is represented by a line parallel to the longitude, and any other latitudo is difformis; the latitudo uniformiter difformis is represented by a right line inclined to the axis of the longitude. He proves that this definition is equivalent to an algebraical relation in which the longitudes and latitudes of any three points would figure: i.e., he gives the equation of the right line, and thus forestalls Descartes in the invention of analytical geometry. This doctrine he extends to figures of three dimensions.
Besides the longitude and latitude of a form, he considers the mensura, or quantitas, of the form, proportional to the area of the figure representing it. He proves this theorem: A form uniformiter difformis has the same quantity as a form uniformis of the same longitude and having as latitude the mean between the two extreme limits of the first. He then shows that his method of figuring the latitude of forms is applicable to the movement of a point, on condition that the time is taken as longitude and the speed as latitude; quantity is, then, the space covered in a given time. In virtue of this transposition, the theorem of the latitude uniformiter difformis became the law of the space traversed in case of uniformly varied motion: Oresme's demonstration is exactly the same as that which Galileo was to render celebrated in the seventeenth century. Moreover, this law was never forgotten during the interval between Oresme and Galileo: it was taught at Oxford by William Heytesbury and his followers, then, at Paris and in Italy, by all the followers of this school. In the middle of the sixteenth century, long before Galileo, the Dominican Dominic Soto applied the law to the uniformly accelerated falling of heavy bodies and to the uniformly decreasing ascension of projectiles."
*Catholic Encyclopedia online
Around 1377, Oresme wrote a treatise called Le livre du ciel et du monde (The Book of the Heavens and Earth), in which he discussed the matter of whether the earth might rotate on its axis. Oresme addressed all the old arguments against rotation, such as the claim that an arrow shot into the air on a rotating earth would land far to the west, by arguing that all motion is relative, and an arrow moving away from a stationary earth would act the same as one on a rotating earth. He pointed out how much simpler the cosmos would be if, instead of having every celestial object whirl around at incredible speeds every 24 hours, God simply rotated the earth at a much slower speed and achieved exactly the same effect. Oresme even maintained that those scriptural passages that suggest a stationary earth need not be read literally, since they were written for popular understanding.*Wik
A page from Oresme's Livre du ciel et du monde, 1377, showing the celestial spheres
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1733 Jakob Hermann (16 July 1678, Basel – 11 July 1733, Basel) was a Swiss mathematician who made contributions to dynamics.*SAU In 1729, he proclaimed that it was as easy to graph a locus on the polar coordinate system as it was to graph it on the Cartesian coordinate system. However, no one listened. He was a distant relative of Leonhard Euler.
He appears to have been the first to show that the Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector is a constant of motion for particles acted upon by an inverse-square central force.*Wik
1807 George Atwood (c. October 1745 – 11 July 1807) was an English mathematician best known for his invention of a low-friction pulley system.*SAU He is the author of Phoronomia, an early treatise on Mechanics. In 1729, he proclaimed that it was as easy to graph a locus on the polar coordinate system as it was to graph it on the Cartesian coordinate system. However, no one listened. He was a distant relative of Euler. *Wik
He is best known for the Atwood machine consists of two masses connected by a lightweight, inextensible string that passes over a pulley. When the masses are different, the system accelerates, with the heavier mass descending and the lighter one ascending.
The machine was revolutionary because it allowed for the precise study of uniformly accelerated motion. By carefully choosing the masses, experimenters could create very small accelerations that were much easier to measure accurately than free fall. This was crucial in the 18th and 19th centuries when timing instruments were far less precise than today. Jakob Hermann had created a similar demonstration, years earlier.
1778 Joseph Stepling, (29 June 1716 in Regensburg; 11 July 1778 in Prague) His fields included astronomy, physics and mathematics. At the age of 17 he documented with great accuracy the 1733 lunar eclipse. Later Euler was among his long list of correspondents. He transposed Aristotelian logic into formulas, thus becoming an early precursor of modern logic. already adopted the atomistic conception of matter he radically refused to accept Aristotelian metaphysics and natural philosophy. In 1748, at the request of the Berlin Academy, he carried out an exact observation of a solar and lunar eclipse in order to determine the precise location of Prague. During Stepling's long tenure at Prague, he set up a laboratory for experimental physics and in 1751 built an observatory, the instruments and fittings of which he brought up to the latest scientific standard.
Even though he passed up a professorship in philosophy in favor of a chair in mathematics, Empress Maria Theresa appointed him director of the faculty of philosophy at Prague as part of the reform of higher education. He was very interested in cultivating the exact sciences and founded a society for the study of science modeled on the Royal Society of London. In their monthly sessions. over which he presided until his death, the group carried out research work and investigations in the field of pure mathematics and its appiication to physics and astronomy. A great number of treatises of this academy were published.
Stepling corresponded with the outstanding contemporary mathematicians and astronomers: Christian Wolf. Leonhard Euler. Christopher Maire, Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, Maximilian Heli, Joseph Franz, Rudjer Boskovic, Heinrich Hiss, and others. Also, Stepling was particularly successful in educating many outstanding scientists, including Johann Wendlingen, Jakob Heinisch, Johannes von Herberstein, Kaspar Sagner, Stephan Schmidt, Johann Korber, and Joseph Bergmann. After his death, Maria Theresia ordered a monument erected in the library of the University of Prague *Joseph MacDonnell, Fairfield Univ web page
1745 George Atwood (Baptized October 15, 1745, Westminster,London – 11 July 1807, London) was an English mathematician who invented a machine for illustrating the effects of Newton's first law of motion. He was the first winner of the Smith's Prize in 1769. He was also a renowned chess player whose skill for recording many games of his own and of other players, including François-André Danican Philidor, the leading master of his time, left a valuable historical record for future generations.
He attended Westminster School and in 1765 was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1769 with the rank of third wrangler and was awarded the inaugural first Smith's Prize. Subsequently he became a fellow and a tutor of the college and in 1776 was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London.
In 1784 he left Cambridge and soon afterwards received from William Pitt the Younger the office of patent searcher of the customs, which required but little attendance, enabling him to devote a considerable portion of his time to mathematics and physics.
He died unmarried in Westminster at the age of 61, and was buried there at St. Margaret's Church. Over a century later, a lunar crater was renamed Atwood in his honour. *Wik
1871 Germain Sommeiller (February 15, 1815 - July 11, 1871) French-Italian engineer who built the Mount Cenis (Fréjus) Tunnel (1857-70) through the Alps, the world's first important mountain tunnel. The two track railway tunnel unites Italian Savoy (north of the mountains) through Switzerland with the rest of Italy to the south. At 8 miles long and it was more than double the length of any previous tunnel. In 1861, after three years of tedious hand-boring a mere eight inches a day into the rock face, Sommeiller introduced the first industrial-scale pneumatics for tunnel digging. He built a special reservoir, high above the tunnel entrance, to produce a head of water that compressed air (to 6 atm.) for pneumatic drills, able to dig up to 20 times faster. Authorised on 15 Aug 1857, the tunnel opened on 17 Sep 1871, as a major triumph of engineering.*TIS Note his death was only a few months before the opening of his great project.
Sommeiller's pneumatic rock-drilling machine
1909 Simon Newcomb (March 12, 1835 – July 11, 1909) died in Washington D.C. He was such a revered scientist that President Taft attended his funeral.*VFR Canadian-American astronomer and and mathematician who prepared ephemerides (tables of computed places of celestial bodies over a period of time) and tables of astronomical constants. He was an astronomer (1861-77) before becoming Superintendent of the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office (1877-97). During this time he undertook numerous studies in celestial mechanics. His central goal was to place planetary and satellite motions on a completely uniform system, thereby raising solar system studies and the theory of gravitation to a new level. He largely accomplished this goal with the adoption of his new system of astronomical constants at the end of the century. *TIS
Newcomb is buried in Arlington National Cemetery
Newcomb is often quoted as saying that heavier than air flight was impossible from a statement he made only two months before the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
1950 Arthur William Conway FRS PRIA (2 October 1875 – 11 July 1950) was a distinguished Irish mathematician and mathematical physicist who wrote one of the first books on relativity and co-edited two volumes of William Rowan Hamilton's collected works. He also served as President of University College Dublin between 1940 and 1947.
One of Conway's students was Éamon de Valera, whom he introduced to Hamilton's quaternions. De Valera warmed to the subject and engaged in research of this novelty of abstract algebra. Later, when de Valera became Taoiseach (he was also subsequently President of Ireland), he called upon Conway while forming the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Toronto in 1924, in 1932 in Zurich, and in 1936 in Oslo. He was elected President of the Royal Irish Academy from 1937 to 1940.
In October 1975, to mark the centenary of his birth, UCD hosted the AC Conway Memorial Mathematical Symposium. Speakers included Roger Penrose, Ian Sneddon, and William B. Bonnor.
In his obituary, E.T. Whittaker referred to Conway as the "most distinguished Irish Catholic man of science of his generation." *Wik
At the 1938 EMS colloquium in St Andrews
1995 Andrzej Alexiewicz (11 February 1917, Lwów, Poland – 11 July 1995) was a Polish mathematician, a disciple of the Lwow School of Mathematics. Alexiewicz was an expert at functional analysis and continued and edited the work of Stefan Banach. *Wik
2019 Werner Buchholz (24 October 1922 – 11 July 2019) He was a member of the teams that designed the IBM 701 and Stretch models. Buchholz used term byte to describe eight bits—although in the 1950s, when the term first was used, equipment used six-bit chunks of information, and a byte equaled six bits. Buchholz described a byte as a group of bits to encode a character, or the numbers of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output. *CHM
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
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