On This Day in Math - May 16

  

To isolate mathematics from the practical demands of the sciencesis to invite the sterility of a cow shut away from the bulls.

Pafnuty Chebyshev
Quoted in G Simmons, Calculus Gems (New York 1992)



The 136th day of the year; 136 is the sum of the cubes of the digits of the sum of the cubes of its digits. (1³ + 3³ + 6³ = 244 and 2³ + 4³ + 4³ = 136) *Tanya Khovanova, Number Gossip (Only one other number pair share this relation. Can you find them?)

The sum of all prime factors of 136 is equal to the reversal of \( \pi(136)\). \( \pi(n)\) is the number of primes less than n (so \( \pi(136)=32 \) and the sum of the prime factors of 136 is 2+2+2+17 =23)

136 is the sum of the first 16 numbers, the numbers in a four by four magic square. It is the magic square associated with the planet Jupiter,and appears in the Albrecht Durer woodcut, "Melancholia I," on the wall behind the suffering "thinker." Some suggest it was there to represent the association of Jupitar (Jovia) and joviality to balance the mood of the work.

As the sum of the first 16 integers, it is a triangular number, but it also the sum of three triangular numbers.  It is the last year day with this quality.

In binary 136 is written as the concatenation of two binary "Eights".  (10001000).  In base 9 is a palindrome (161) and in Hexdecimal it is a repdigit (88).  

Lots of numbers are expressible as the sum of two squares, but 136 is the smallest that can be expressed  where neither of the two are squares of a prime. (136 = 10^2 + 6^2) *Prime Curios

136 is the number of walks of length 9 between two adjacent vertices in the cycle graph C_8 (A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H)
See More Number facts at Math Day of the Year Facts

EVENTS

1571 Johannes Kepler was conceived at 4:37 a.m. on his parents’ wedding night, according to his computations for his own horoscope. His actual date of birth is more certain, Dec 17th of the same year. He was born in Weil der Stadt, about 20 km west of Stuttgart, There is a museum in the Marketplatz that claims to be his birthplace, but the building seems to only date to about 1648.

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1667 "...in the course of attempting to conceive of the physical laws that would explain how the Moon revolved around the Earth, Newton happened to be sitting near the apple tree in the garden at Woolsthorpe when he saw an apple drop to the ground. At that moment, he realized that the same central pull of the Earth applied to both objects. *Brody & Brody, The Science Class You Wish You Had
On April 15, 1726, writer William Stukeley held a conversation with Isaac Newton in Kensington during which Newton recalled “when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind.” Later, Stukeley writing in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, recorded that Newton said, “It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre.” *TIS The story was also related to John Conduitt who was Newton's assistant at the Royal mint, and the husband of Newton's niece. The idea that the apple hit Newton on the head seems to date from the early 20th Century. A copy of the page of Stukeley's manuscript where he tells this story is available on-line at the Royal Society.

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1678  Hooke records in his diary that he has been performing experiments on mercury barometers at the Great Fire memorial on Fish St.  "It descended at the top by about 1/3 of an inch." *Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits pg 78

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1695 Leibniz, in a letter to Johann Bernoulli, tells of his discovery of the multinomial theorem, “a wonderful rule for the coefficients of powers not only of the binomial x + y, but also of the trinomial x + y + z, in fact, of any polynomial.” [Smith, Source Book, p. 229]*VFR
This allows us to find terms of the expansion of, say, (x+y+z)⁶ and show that the term with x³y²z will have a coefficient of

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1713 John Machin was appointed as Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. He succeed Dr Torriano and went on to hold the chair until his death 38 years later. *SAU  He is best known for developing a quickly converging series for pi in 1706 and using it to compute pi to 100 decimal places.  To compute π to 100 decimal places, he combined his formula with the Taylor series expansion for the inverse tangent. (Brook Taylor was Machin's contemporary in Cambridge University.) Machin's formula remained the primary tool of pi-hunters for centuries (well into the computer era).

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1800 Gauss records in his diary “On about these days (May 16) we most elegantly resolved the problem of the chronology of the Easter Feast.” [Gray, Expositiones Mathematicae, 2(1984), 97–130] *VFR

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1876, root beer was invented by Charles Elmer Hires.  it is the longest continuously made soft drink in the United States.   I'll drink to that!

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1910 Halley's comet was big news during its visible period in New York City. Beginning with the Saturday edition of May 14 and continuing on through the Sunday edition of May 22, the comet was given top billing in the New York Times. This was the period when the comet was at the height of its brilliance and activity and the coverage clearly reflected this.
May 16: European and American astronomers agree Earth will not suffer from passing through comet’s tail. *Joseph M. Laufer, Halley's Comet Society - USA

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1931 Einstein visited Oxford University to give the Rhodes Lectures, and receive a degree. During his talks, one of his blackboards was preserved and is now stored in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. The calculations are related to what is now called the Friedman-Einstein model of the universe.

The numerical estimates of cosmic parameters in Einstein’s 1931 paper – and on the blackboard – contain a systematic error. Analysis of the 1931 paper shows that, given the contemporaneous Hubble constant of 500 km s−1Mpc−1, Einstein's estimates of cosmic density, radius and timespan should have been ρ ~ 10−28 g/cm3, P ~ 108 light-years and t ~ 109 years respectively. One line on the blackboard, not included in the published paper, makes the nature of Einstein's error clear. In the fourth line on the blackboard, Einstein obtains a value of 10−53 cm−2 for the quantity D2, defined in the top line of the blackboard as D = (1/c). (1/P).(dP/dt), i.e., the Hubble constant divided by the speed of light. Simple calculation shows that the contemporaneous value of the Hubble constant in fact implied a value of D2 ~ 10−55 cm−2 (or 10−51 m−2) for this quantity. It appears that Einstein stumbled in converting megaparsecs to cm, giving a density of matter that was too high by a factor of a hundred, a cosmic radius that was too low by a factor of ten, and a timespan for the expansion that was too high by a factor of ten. These errors were corrected in a later review of relativistic cosmology written by Einstein in 1945. *Wik

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1940 Dr. H. J. Spinden reported the decipherment of Mayan relics in Mexico indicate a civilization 1250 years in advance of Europe in astronomy and mathematics.

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1960 "VoilÁ. that Was It! The Laser was Born!" words Hughes Research Laboratories' physicist Dr. Theodore Maiman used in recounting the historic moment he and fellow researchers Drs. Irnee D'Haenens and Charles Asawa's synthetic ruby laser produced light pulses that steadily increased in brightness as the simple, yet revolutionary, device was powered up. "The output trace started to shoot up in peak intensity and the initial decay time rapidly decreased," he recalled. *Hughes Research Lab Web page.

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2005 President George W Bush announced that Lenore Blum was one of the recipients of the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. The citation reads:-

"Lenore Blum of Carnegie Mellon University helped pioneer the Expanding Your Horizons program at Mills College in 1973. The program - designed to introduce young female students to women in science and related careers - has since gone national through the Math/Science Network. Blum's leadership has also been instrumental in transforming the culture of computing at Carnegie Mellon to embrace diversity as critical for the field and future of our nation and by creating a model mentorship organization, Women@SCS, for women students in computer science."

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2014  Google celebrates the anniversary of the birth of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (below) .

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BIRTHS

1718 Maria Gaetana Agnesi (May 16, 1718 – January 9, 1799)  Her Istituzioni analitiche of 1748 was an important calculus text. Her name is most often associated with the cubic curve called the Witch of Agnesi, which gets its name by mistranslation. Her sister Maria Teresa was a noted composer.*VFR
For stat's students, I point out that the “witch” is also the same curve as Gossett’s t-distribution with only one degree of freedom. Find more on the history of the name “witch”. After the death of her father in 1752, Agnesi entirely devoted herself and spent her money to do charitable work. She died in total poverty in the poorhouse of which she had been the director. The MAA Digital Library has images of several pages from Istituzioni analitiche, including her illustration of the construction of "The Witch".  There is also a image of page 381 on which she clearly writes la versiera.

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1804  Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, (May 16, 1804 – January 3, 1894) the educator who opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States. Long before most educators, Peabody embraced the premise that children's play has intrinsic developmental and educational value. *Library of Congress 

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1821 Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev (16  May 1821 (4 May OS) - 8 Dec 1894) Russian mathematician who founded the St. Petersburg mathematical school (sometimes called the Chebyshev school), who is remembered primarily for his work on the theory of prime numbers, including the determination of the number of primes not exceeding a given number. He wrote about many subjects, including the theory of congruences in 1849, probability theory, quadratic forms, orthogonal functions, the theory of integrals, the construction of maps, and the calculation of geometric volumes. Chebyshev was also interested in mechanics and studied the problems involved in converting rotary motion into rectilinear motion by mechanical coupling. The Chebyshev parallel motion is three linked bars approximating rectilinear motion. *TIS
(I always loved the little jingle by Nathan Fine, "Chebyshev said, and I say it again. There is always a prime between n and 2n.")
For an amusing article on how to spell Tschebyscheff, see The Thread (Birkhauser Boston) by Philip J. Davis, or an article with the same title in the Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, 14(1983), 98–104. *VFR

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1909 Werner Romberg (born 16 May 1909 in Berlin; died 5 February 2003 in Heidelberg) was a German mathematician and physicist.

Romberg studied mathematics and physics form 1928 in Heidelberg and Munich and completed his doctorate in 1933 at Munich University under the supervision of Arnold Sommerfeld; his thesis was entitled "Zur Polarisation des Kanalstrahllichtes" ["On the polarisation of channel light beams"]. In Munich he studied mathematics under, among others, Oskar Perron and Constantin Carathéodory. In 1933, as a so-called "half-Jew" in the terminology of the new National Socialist government of Germany, he sought to emigrate to the Soviet Union. From 1934 to 1937 he worked as a theoretical physicist in the university of Dnipro (then Dnipropetrovsk). In 1938 he went, via the Institute for Astrophysics in Prague, to Norway, where he became an assistant to Egil Hylleraas at the University of Oslo. He also briefly worked at the Technical University of Trondheim with Johan Holtsmark, who was building a Van de Graaff generator there. With the German occupation of Norway he fled to Uppsala in Sweden. In 1941 the Nazi German state stripped him of his German citizenship, and in 1943 recognition of his doctorate was revoked. He became a Norwegian citizen in 1947.

After the Second World War, from 1949 to 1968, he was a professor in Trondheim; from 1960 he was head of the applied mathematics department. In Norway he built up his research group in numerical analysis, and part of the introduction of digital computers, such as GIER, the first computer at Trondheim. From 1968 he held the chair for Mathematical Methods in Natural Sciences and Numerics at Heidelberg University. *Wik

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1911 John Todd (May 16, 1911 – June 21, 2007) was a Northern Irish mathematician most of whose career was spent in England and the USA; he was a pioneer in the field of numerical analysis.

He was born in Carnacally, County Down, Ireland, and grew up near Belfast. He attended Methodist College Belfast after winning a scholarship. In his final year at the College he only studied maths as a result of his desire to become an engineer. He received his BSc degree from Queen's University in 1931, and went to St. John's College at Cambridge University, studying for 2 years with J. E. Littlewood, who advised him against getting a doctorate and just to do research.

He taught at Queen's University Belfast 1933-1937, and was an invited speaker at the 1936 ICM in Oslo on "Transfinite Superpositions of Absolutely Continuous Functions"

He worked at King's College in London for the years 1937–1939 (and again 1945–1947), where he met Olga Taussky, a matrix and number theorist (she had also been an invited speaker in Oslo). They were married in 1938. Todd returned to Belfast to teach at Methodist College Belfast 1940-1941. As part of the war effort, he had worked for the British Admiralty 1941-1945. One of Todd's greatest achievements was the preservation of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach in Germany at the end of the war.

In 1945 the Todds emigrated to the United States and worked for the National Bureau of Standards. In 1957 they joined the faculty of California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

Todd retired from the faculty, and in May, 2001 was honored by a symposium at Caltech in honor of his 90th birthday. He was called Jack Todd by all who knew him. He died at his home in Pasadena, California on June 21, 2007. *Wik

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1925 Nancy Grace Roman (May 16, 1925..Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.-December 25, 2018 (aged 93)) was an American astronomer and one of the first female executives at NASA. She is known to many as the "Mother of Hubble" for her role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope. Throughout her career, Roman was also an active public speaker and educator, and an advocate for women in the sciences.
When Roman was eleven years old, she showed interest in astronomy by forming an astronomy club among her classmates in Nevada. She and her classmates got together once a week and learned about constellations from books. Although discouraged by those around her, Roman knew by the time she was in high school that she wanted to pursue her passion for astronomy. She attended Western High School in Baltimore where she participated in an accelerated program and was graduated in three years. *Wik

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1934 Roy P(atrick) Kerr (16 May 1934 - )is a New Zealander mathematician who solved (1963) Einstein's field equations of general relativity to describe rotating black holes, thus providing a major contribution to the field of astrophysics. He deduced a unique two-parameter family of solutions which describes the space-time around black holes in July 1963. The two parameters are the mass of the black hole and the angular momentum of the black hole. (The static solution, with zero angular momentum, was discovered by Karl Schwarzschild in Dec 1915.) Rotating black holes are often called Kerr Black Holes. He showed that there is a vortex-like region outside the event horizon, called the ergo-region, that drags space and time around with the rotating black hole.*TIS  In 2023(?) Kerr argued that Penrose and Hawking were wrong in their description of singularities, and says "Singularities don't exist."

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1950  Johannes Georg Bednorz ( born 16 May 1950, ) is a German physicist who, together with K. Alex Müller, discovered high-temperature superconductivity in ceramics, for which they shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1982, after obtaining his PhD, he joined the IBM lab. There, he joined Müller's ongoing research on superconductivity. In 1983, Bednorz and Müller began a systematic study of the electrical properties of ceramics formed from transition metal oxides, and in 1986 they succeeded in inducing superconductivity in a lanthanum barium copper oxide (LaBaCuO, also known as LBCO). The oxide's critical temperature (Tc) was 35 K, a full 12 K higher than the previous record. This discovery stimulated a great deal of additional research in high-temperature superconductivity on cuprate materials with structures similar to LBCO, soon leading to the discovery of compounds such as BSCCO (Tc 107K) and YBCO (Tc 92K).

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DEATHS

1830 Baron Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier (21 Mar 1768; 16 May 1830 at age 62) French mathematician, Egyptologist and administrator who exerted strong influence on mathematical physics through his Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822; The Analytical Theory of Heat). He introduced an infinite mathematical series to aid in solving conduction equations. This analysis technique allows the function of any variable to be expanded into a series of sines of multiples of the variable, which is now known as the Fourier series. His equations spawned many new areas of study in mathematics and physics, including the branch of optics named for him, have subsequently been applied other natural phenomena such as tides, weather and sunspots.*TIS His work on heat was termed by Maxwell, “a great mathematical poem.” He traveled to Egypt with Napoleon and became convinced that desert heat was ideal for good health. Consequently, he wore many layers of garments and lived in rooms of unbearably high heat. This hastened his death, by heart disease, so that he died, thoroughly cooked. [Eves, History of Mathematics, 362] *VFR

He introduced an infinite mathematical series to aid in solving conduction equations. This analysis technique allows the function of any variable to be expanded into a series of sines of multiples of the variable, which is now known as the Fourier series. His equations spawned many new areas of study in mathematics and physics, including the branch of optics named for him, have subsequently been applied other natural phenomena such as tides, weather and sunspots.*TIS Fourier was buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in a tomb decorated with an Egyptian motif.

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1935 Hector Munro Macdonald (19 Jan 1865 in Edinburgh, Scotland - 16 May 1935 in Aberdeen, Scotland) Macdonald graduated from Aberdeen and Cambridge Universities. He stayed on at Cambridge and won the Adams prize. He returned to Aberdeen as Professor. He did important work on electromagnetic waves. *SAU

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1943 Roberto Marcolongo (August 28, 1862 in Rome – May 16, 1943 in Rome) was an Italian mathematician , known for his research in vector calculus and theoretical physics .

He graduated in 1886, and later he was an assistant of Valentino Cerruti in Rome. In 1895 he became professor of rational mechanics at the University of Messina . In 1908 he moved to the University of Naples , where he remained until retirement in 1935.

He worked on vector calculus together with Cesare Burali-Forti , which was then known as "Italian notation". In 1906 he wrote an early work which used the four-dimensional formalism to account for relativistic invariance under Lorentz transformations .

In 1921 he published to Messina one of the first treaties on the special relativity and general, where he used the absolute differential calculus without coordinates, developed with Burali-Forti, as opposed to the absolute differential calculus with coordinates of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro .

He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and other Italian academies.

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1983 Edouard Zeckendorf (2 May 1901 in Liège, Belgium - 16 May 1983 in Liège, Belgium)

Eduourd Zeckendorf was an amateur mathematician whose name is given to the property that every positive integer can be represented uniquely as the sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers, the sequence defined by

F₁ = F₂ = 1 and F_n = F_n-1 + F_n-2 for n greater than 2.

This is called Zeckendorf's theorem, and the subsequence of Fibonacci numbers which add up to a given integer is called its Zeckendorf representation. (Because F₁= F₂, we need to exclude F₁ from the representation to give uniqueness.) For example,

71 = 55 + 13 + 3,
1111 = 987 + 89 + 34 + 1.

Zeckendorf qualified as a medical doctor, became an officer in the Belgium army in 1925 and subsequently also qualified as a dentist. Following the surrender of the Belgium army in May 1940 Zeckendorf was interned as a prisoner of war until 1945. He subsequently published several mathematical papers, nearly all of them in the Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, mainly on elementary number theory.

*SAU

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1995 Raymond Arthur Lyttleton(May 7, 1911 – May 16, 1995) English mathematician and theoretical astronomer who researched stellar evolution and composition. In 1939, with Fred Hoyle, he demonstrated the large scale existance of interstellar hydrogen, refuting the existing belief of that space was devoid of interstellar gas. Together, in the early 1940's, they applied nuclear physics to explain how energy is generated by stars. In his own mongoraph (1953) Lyttleton described stability of rotating liquid masses, which he extended later to explain that the Earth had a liquid core resulting from a phase change associated with a combination of intense pressure and temperature. With Hermann Bondi, in 1959, he proposed the electrostatic theory of the expanding universe. He authored various astronomy books. *TIS

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2013  Heinrich Rohrer (6 June 1933 – 16 May 2013) was a Swiss physicist who shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska. Ruska's electron microscope of the 1930s was unable to show surface structure at the atomic level. Rohrer and Binnig began work in 1978 on a scanning tunneling microscope in which a fine probe passes within a few angstroms of the surface of the sample. A positive voltage on the probe enables electrons to move from the sample to the probe by the tunnel effect, and the detected current can used to keep the probe at a constant distance from the surface. As the probe moves in parallel lines, a 3D image of the surface can be constructed.

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2025 Peter David Lax (1 May 1926 - 16 May 2025) is a mathematician working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. He has made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics and shock waves, solitonic physics, hyperbolic conservation laws, and mathematical and scientific computing, among other fields. Lax is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher. In a 1958 paper Lax stated a conjecture about matrix representations for third order hyperbolic polynomials which remained unproven for over four decades. Interest in the "Lax conjecture" grew as mathematicians working in several different areas recognized the importance of its implications in their field, until it was finally proven to be true in 2003.
Lax holds a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University*Wik

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

On This Day in Math - May 15

  

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on : nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. 

The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam

The 135th day of the year; 135 = 1¹ + 3² + 5³. *What's So Special About This Number 

135 is the smallest non-trivial SP (sum times product) number. If you take the sum of the digits of a number, and also the product of the digits, and then multiply the two outcomes, there are only three positive numbers for which you will get the original value. One works, trivially. The other two are 135 and 144.  135-> (1+3+5)*(1*3*5) = 9*15=135.   144->(1+4+4)*(1*4*4)= 9 * 16 = 144.
A Good exercise for students is to take the SP product in a iteration to find out if it goes to zero, or repeats some pattern, or lands eventually on one of these three fixed points. (Try it with your students). 23->5*6 = 30.  30-> 3*0 = 0.... fixed point.

\(135 \equiv 3 (\mod 6)\) and so 135 is expressible as the difference of two squares, using bases three apart.  The two bases must sum to 135 / 3 = 45.  So 21 and 24 should work, and 24² - 21² = 135  

Both 1!+3!+5!= 127 is prime; and 1!!+3!!+5!! is prime if the double factorial n!! means n (n-2)(n-4).... (the same symbol is sometimes used for the factorial of n! ).

135 is a "partition number", the number of ways to partition 14. We still do not know if there are an infinite number of "partition numbers" which are divisible by 3, although we do know there are an infinite number divisible by 2

Quick! How many primes from 1000 to 2000?    135, of course!

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EVENTS

1618 Kepler Writes his third law of planetary motion. He was teaching at the Landschaftsschule in Linz (1612 - 1630) and also continuing to be Court Mathematician. During this period, he married Susanna Reuttinger while he was here (1613) and produced Harmonices Mundi, (1618) giving his third law.[Kepler's third law says that the square of the time it takes a planet to travel its path around the sun is proportional to the cube of the average distance from the sun] He also became acquainted with the techniques of measuring wine casks here, a practical art for the 17th century as barrels were not uniform in design. He wrote "Stereometria Doliorum Vinariorum” in 1615 and gave the dimensions of the “ideal” cask. 
He attempted to explain proportions and geometry in planetary motions by relating them to musical scales and intervals (an extension of what Pythagoras had described as the "harmony of the spheres".) Kepler said each planet produces musical tones during its revolution about the sun, and the pitch of the tones varies with the angular velocities of those planets as measured from the sun.  The Earth sings Mi, Fa, Mi. At very rare intervals all planets would sing in perfect concord. Kepler proposed that this may have happened only once in history, perhaps at the time of creation. (assorted sources). For more detail, including Kepler's own announcement of his third law, see   "The Renaissance Mathematicus"

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1718 James Puckle, a London lawyer, patents the world's first machine gun. The Puckle gun (also known as the defence gun) was a primitive crew-served, manually-operated flintlock revolver patented in 1718 by James Puckle (1667–1724), a British inventor, lawyer and writer. It was one of the earliest weapons to be referred to as a "machine gun", being called such in a 1722 shipping manifest, though its operation does not match the modern use of the term. It was never used during any combat operation or war. Production was highly limited and may have been as few as two guns.*Wik

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1817 John Herschel in a letter to Charles Babbage sent a mysterious doodle that still seem to be much of a mystery. Herschel said: "Interpret this hieroglyphic, it contains a great discovery." The figure at the center is described as: "Dionysius the God of Functions, alias the genius of numerical magnitude." The God of Functions is suspected to refer to Dionysius Lardner who taught Mathematics at Trinity College at that time.Many of the symbols seem to have no relevance to mathematics of the period. They may have been ideas tossed around between the two men in their attempts to modernize British Mathematics

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1834 After first rejecting Whewell's suggestions on May 3, Faraday writes, "I have taken your advice, and the names used are anode cathode anions cations and ions; the last I shall have but little occasion for. I had some hot objections made to them here and found myself very much in the condition of the man with his son and ass who tried to please every body; but when I held up the shield of your authority, it was wonderful to observe how the tone of objection melted away." *Frank James (ed.), The Correspondence of Michael Faraday (1993), Vol. 2, 186.

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1836 Francis Baily observed "Baily's Beads" during an annular solar eclipse. His vivid description aroused new interest in the study of eclipses. Baily's Beads are the bright points of light, that appear around the edge of the moon during a solar eclipse. The beads are created by sunlight passing through the moon's valleys. The last bead is the brightest, resembling a diamond on a brilliant ring. After retiring from a successful business career (1825), Baily turned to science. He revised several star catalogs, repeated Henry Cavendish's experiments to determine the density of the Earth, and measured its elliptical shape. His protests regarding the British Nautical Almanac, then notorious for its errors, were instrumental in bringing about its reform.

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1910 Halley's comet was big news during its visible period in New York City. Beginning with the Saturday edition of May 14 and continuing on through the Sunday edition of May 22, the comet was given top billing in the New York Times. This was the period when the comet was at the height of its brilliance and activity and the coverage clearly reflected this.
May 15: (Sunday edition) – Speculation on probability of Earth passing through comet’s tail. Article on those still living who remember Halley’s Comet visit of 75 years ago. *Joseph M. Laufer, Halley's Comet Society - USA

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1921 First record of Aurora Borealis observation during day time? Aurora seen in New Zealand and surrounding islands. NASA Eclipse Calendar   The first recorded observation is in late Babylonian astronomical texts, discovered at the site of Babylon (32.5°N, 44.4°E) more than a century ago, contain what is probably the earliest reliable account of the aurora borealis. A clay tablet recording numerous celestial observations made by the official astronomers during the 37th year of King Nebuchadnezzar II (568/567 BC) describes an unusual “red glow” in the sky at night; the exact date of this observation corresponds to the night of 12/13 March in 567 BC. 

 Later on, Henry Cavendish recorded the first scientific observations.) of the northern lights in 1790. Using triangulation, the French-born English scientist determined the aurora borealis occurred approximately 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. It was British astronomer Richard Carrington, in 1859, who linked the aurora borealis with the sun.

Aurora viewed from space

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1935, at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Albert Einstein was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal for his outstanding fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, especially his relativity theory. According to Time magazine, "A throng of scientists and dignitaries was assembled to hear what the medalist had to say. Einstein genially informed the chairman that he had nothing to say, that inspiration which he had awaited until the last moment had failed him. The chairman, much more embarrassed than the medalist, conveyed this information to the audience." In atonement, Einstein wrote a 44-page essay entitled "Physics and Reality," published in the Mar 1936 issue of their Journal of the Franklin Institute. *TIS

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1948 The independent State of Israel established. In 1952 the Israeli government asked Einstein, who had labored for the creation of the State, to accept the presidency of the country. He sadly declined the honor, insisting that he was not fitted for such a position. *VFR

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1961, the first computer in Argentina began operating at the University of Buenos Aires. It was a Ferranti Mercury computer called Clementina because it had been programmed to play the song Oh My Darling, Clementine. Cecilia Berdichevsky was one of the mathematicians who worked on it.

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1971 Nicaragua issued a series of stamps showing “mathematical equations which changed the world.” They range from 1 + 1 = 2 (Egyptians counting on their fingers) to Napier’s law of logarithms and the Pythagorean Theorem. On the back of each stamp is a descriptive paragraph. [Scott #877–881, C761–5] all ten are here

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1985 At a Columbia University graduation Benoit B. Mandelbrot received the Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science, an award made every five years. He is noted for his work on fractals.*VFR   Here is a nice link to a web page showing the Mandelbrot set as a “catalogue\ of Julia Sets”.   Mandelbrot has been at the IBM research institute in Yorktown Heights since 1958.  He is now emeritus and also holds a professorship at Yale since 2000.

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2004 Josh Findley discovered the 41st Mersenne prime, 2^24,036,583 - 1. He found it using a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 computer. A Mersenne prime number is one less than a power of two expressed as Mn = 2n - 1. For this to be true, the exponent n must also be prime. Mersenne primes have a close connection to perfect numbers, which are equal to the sum of their proper divisors. The study of Mersenne primes was motivated by this connection. In the 4th century B.C. Euclid demonstrated that if M is a Mersenne prime, then M(M+1)/2 is a perfect number. In the 18th century, Leonhard Euler proved that all even perfect numbers have this form. No odd perfect numbers are known and it is suspected that none exist. It is currently unknown whether an infinite number of Mersenne primes exist. *CHM 

Mersenne primes take their name from the 17th-century French scholar Marin Mersenne, who compiled what was supposed to be a list of Mersenne primes with exponents up to 257. The exponents listed by Mersenne in 1644 were as follows:

2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 67, 127, 257.

His list replicated the known primes of his time with exponents up to 19. His next entry, 31, was correct, but the list then became largely incorrect, as Mersenne mistakenly included M67 and M257 (which are composite) and omitted M61, M89, and M107 (which are prime). Mersenne gave little indication of how he came up with his list.

Édouard Lucas (Creator of the towers of Hanoi puzzle) proved in 1876 that M127 is indeed prime, as Mersenne claimed. This was the largest known prime number for 75 years until 1951,

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BIRTHS

1048 Omar Khayyam (15 May, 1048 - 1131)
mathematician and poet, He was the first to claim cubic equations—and hence angle trisection—could not be solved with straightedge and compass. P. Wantzel gave a proof in 1837. *VFR Omar Khayyám (1048–1131; Persian: ‏عمر خیام‎) was a Persian polymath: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, climatology and Islamic theology.
Born in Nishapur, at a young age he moved to Samarkand and obtained his education there, afterwards he moved to Bukhara and became established as one of the major mathematicians and astronomers of the medieval period. He is the author of one of the most important treatises on algebra written before modern times, the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle. He also contributed to a calendar reform.*Wik
Khayyam , produced a work on algebra that was used as a textbook in Persia until this century. In geometry, he studied generalities of Euclid and contributed to the theory of parallel lines. Around 1074, he set up an observatory and led work on compiling astronomical tables, and also contributed to the reform of the Persian calendar. His contributions to other fields of science included developing methods for the accurate determination of specific gravity. He is known to English-speaking readers for his "quatrains" as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald, though it is now regarded as an anthology of which little or nothing may be by Omar. *TIS

Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" the first page of two-chaptered manuscript kept in Tehran University *Wik

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1615 Frans van Schooten (1615 in Leiden – 29 May 1660 in Leiden) was a Dutch mathematician who was one of the main people to promote the spread of Cartesian geometry. *Wikipedia  His group of students extended Descartes work and created a calculus without limits. Hudde in particular was highly rated by Leibniz; "Leibniz in particular was impressed with Hudde’s work, and when Johann Bernoulli proposed the brachistochrone problem, Leibniz lamented: If Huygens lived and was healthy, the man would rest, except to solve your problem. Now there is no one to expect a quick solution from, except for the Marquis de l’Hopital, your brother [Jacob Bernoulli], and Newton, and to this list we might add Hudde, the Mayor of Amsterdam, except that some time ago he put aside these pursuits ."

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1637 Valentin Heins (May 15th 1637 in Hamburg - November 17 1704 ) was a German arithmetician (Reckoner)
The son of a linen weaver, the source of his education is unknown. From 1651 Heins was licensed to provide instruction in commercial computing (accounting, bookkeeping, arithmetic, etc). In the years 1658 and 1659 Heins studied theology for several semesters at the universities of Jena and Leipzig , but then returned to Hamburg. There he married and had a vicariate (financial endoument) in 1661 at the Cathedral. Whether Heins performed for a service is not known.
In 1670 he became writing and arithmetic master of the German Church School St. Michaelis . He was also from 1663-1672 accountant of the Guinean-African Company.
He wrote several textbooks, which made him known beyond national boundaries. They were reprinted up to the beginning of the 19th Century. Particularly popular was his tyrocinium mercatorio arithmeticum, a commercial arithmetic and accounting book.
Heins founded in 1690, with the calculation of the parish school master of St. Jacobi Henry Meissner , the art-loving Societät billing. This later became the Mathematical Society of Hamburg, the worlds oldest existing mathematical society. *Wik

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1689 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (15 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet.  She is listed in this blog because during her life in Turkey with her diplomat husband, she realized that the Turkish people almost never suffered the scars of smallpox.  Investigating, she found that mothers would take a scab from a smallpox sufferer and open their children's veins in several places and plant the scabs there.   She did the same to her own children and when she returned to England she shared the idea with her friends and tried to make its use more broad.  She persuaded the Princess of Wales to test the treatment and seven prisoners' awaiting execution were offered the treatment in exchange for clemency.  All survived, and were released. Catherine the Great and her son Paul were both inoculated.  When Lady Mary Montagu died in 21 August of 1762, Edward Jenner was thirteen years old.  HT @drSueMoss

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1720 Maximilian Hell (May 15, 1720 – April 14, 1792) was a Slovak astronomer and an ordained Jesuit priest from the Kingdom of Hungary.
Born as Rudolf Maximilian Höll in Selmecbánya, Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia)., but later changed his surname to Hell. He was the third son from the second marriage of his father Matthias Cornelius Hell (Matthäus Kornelius Hell) and his mother Julianna Staindl. The couple had a total of 22 children. Registry entries indicate that the family was of German descent, while Maximilian Hell later in life (ca 1750) is known to declare himself as Hungarian.
Hell became the director of the Vienna Observatory in 1756. He published the astronomical tables Ephemerides astronomicae ad meridianum Vindobonemsem ("Ephemerides for the Meridian of Vienna"). He and his assistant János Sajnovics went to Vardø in the far north of Norway (then part of Denmark-Norway) to observe the 1769 transit of Venus. He was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters on October 13, 1769. This society also funded the publication of his 1770 account of the Venus passage Observatio transitus Veneris ante discum Solis die 3. Junii anno 1769 (Copenhagen, 1770).
There was some controversy about Hell's observations of the transit of Venus because he stayed in Norway for eight months, collecting non-astronomical scientific data about the arctic regions for a planned encyclopedia (which never appeared, in part due to the suppression of the Jesuit order). The publication of his results was delayed, and some (notably Joseph Johann Littrow) accused Hell posthumously of falsifying his results. However, Simon Newcomb carefully studied Hell's notebooks and exonerated him a century after his death in Vienna.
Besides astronomy, Hell also had an interest in magnet therapy (the alleged healing power of magnets), although it was Franz Anton Mesmer who went further with this and received most of the credit.
In 1771, Hell was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The crater Hell on the Moon is named after him. *Wik

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1801 Joseph Ludwig Raabe (15 May 1801 in Brody, Galicia – 22 January 1859 in Zürich, Switzerland) was a Swiss mathematician. He began to study mathematics in 1820 at the Polytechnicum in Vienna, Austria. In the autumn of 1831, he moved to Zürich, where he became professor of mathematics in 1833. In 1855, he became professor at the newly founded Swiss Polytechnicum.

He is best known for Raabe's ratio test, an extension of d'Alembert's ratio test. Raabe's test serves to determine the convergence or divergence of an infinite series, in some cases. He is also known for the Raabe integral of the gamma function:

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1835 Émile Léonard Mathieu (May 15, 1835, Metz – October 19, 1890, Nancy) is remembered especially for his discovery (in 1860 and 1873) of five sporadic simple groups named after him*SAU The Mathieu group is related to the solutions of the fifteen puzzle, and the more recent Rubix Cube.

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1857 Hermann Ludwig Gustav Wiener (15 May 1857 in Karlsruhe, Germany - 13 June 1939 in Darmstadt, Germany) was a German mathematician who worked on the foundations of geometry. Although Wiener is not explicitly credited with influencing Hilbert in his championing of the axiomatic method, it is still worth noting that he gave the talk Über Grundlagen und Aufbau der Geometrie to the German Mathematical Society which was published in the first volume of the Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung (1892). Wiener proposed that geometry be studied without using visual images, but rather by abstract axiomatic methods. He also joined his father in the creation of mathematical models of geometric surfaces, constructed from plaster and wire. *SAU

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1857  Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming (May 15, 1857 – May 21, 1911) Scottish-born American astronomer who pioneered in the classification of stellar spectra and the first to discover stars called "white dwarfs." She emigrated to Boston at age 21. Prof. Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory first employed Fleming as a maid, but in 1881 hired her to do clerical work and some mathematical calculations at the Observatory. She further proved capable of doing science. After devising her system of classifying stars by their spectra, she cataloged over 10,000 stars within the next nine years. Her duties were expanded and she was put in charge of dozens of young women hired to do mathematical computations (as now done by computers).*TIS

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1859 Pierre Curie (French: [15 May 1859 – 19 April 1906) was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity. In 1903 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Skłodowska Curie, and Henri Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". *Wik

When awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, Pierre Curie rejected the prize unless he could share it with his wife Marie. In his response, Pierre was adamant that awarding their research on radioactivity without recognising Marie's essential contribution would be unjust. *The Nobel Prize

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1863 Frank Hornby (15 May 1863; 21 Sep 1936 at age 73) English inventor and manufacturer who patented the Meccano construction set in 1901. This toy used perforated metal strips, wheels, roods, brackets, clips and assembly nuts and bolts to build unlimited numbers of models. His original sets, marketed as "Mechanics Made Easy" produced in a rented room, were initially sold at only one Liverpool toy shop. By 1908, he had formed his company, Meccano Ltd., and within five more years had established manufacturing in France, Germany, Spain and the U.S. He introduced Hornby model trains in 1920, originally clockwork and eventually electrically powered with tracks and scale replicas of associated buildings. The "Dinky" range of miniature cars and other motor vehicles was added in 1933. *TIS

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1865  Alice Everett (15 May 1865 – 21 July 1949) was a British astronomer and engineer who grew up in Belfast. Everett is best known for being the first woman to be paid for astronomical work at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, when she began her employment at the observatory January 1890. In 1903 she was the first woman to have a paper published by the Physical Society of London. She also contributed to the fields of optics and early television.

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1899  Joseph Berkson,  (15 May, 1899 - 12 Sep, 1982) Dr. Berkson became Head of Biometry and Medical Statistics at the renowned Mayo Clinic in 1933, which he held until his retirement in 1964.
His research interests covered all aspects of medical statistics, resulting in 118 scientific papers from 1928 to 1980. He was involved in a number of controversies, particularly that involving the rate of cigarette smoking in lung cancer.
Two well-known coinages of Berkson that became common in Statistics are from two of his articles: “Rao-Blackwellization” (1955 article in JASA) and “logit” (1944 article in JASA).
Also, a 1946 paper by Berkson introduced what later became known as “Berkson’s Fallacy”, which is now part of Biostat 101 courses.
[Note: Berkson's Fallacy would make for a good post-APStatExam lesson as it involves a common chi-square test in a Simpson's Paradox-like setting...] *David Bee

An example of Berkson's paradox:

In figure 1, assume that talent and attractiveness are uncorrelated in the population.

In figure 2, someone sampling the population using celebrities may wrongly infer that talent is negatively correlated with attractiveness, as people who are neither talented nor attractive do not typically become celebrities.

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1903 Maria Reiche ( 15 May 1903 - 8 June, 1998) German-born Peruvian mathematician and archaeologist who was the self-appointed keeper of the Nazca Lines, a series of desert ground drawings over 1,000 years old, near Nazcain in southern Peru. For 50 years the "Lady of the Lines" studied and protected these etchings of animals and geometric patterns in 60 km (35 mi) of desert. Protected by a lack of wind and rain, the figures are hundreds of feet long best seen from the air. She investigated the Nazca lines from a mathematical point of view. Death at age 95 interrupted her new mathematical calculations: the possibility that the lines predicted cyclical natural phenomena like El Nino, a weather system that for centuries has periodically caused disastrous flooding along the Peruvian coast. *TIS

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1939 Brian Hartley (15 May 1939-8 October 1994) was a British Mathematician specialising in group theory.
Hartley's Ph.D. thesis was completed in 1964 at the University of Cambridge under Philip Hall's supervision. He spent a year at the University of Chicago, and another at MIT before being appointed as a lecturer at the newly established University of Warwick in 1966, and was promoted to reader in 1973. He moved to a chair at Manchester in 1977 where he served as head of the Mathematics department between 1982 and 1984.
He published more than 100 papers, mostly on group theory, and collaborated widely with other mathematicians. His main interest was locally finite groups where he used his wide knowledge of finite groups to prove properties of infinite groups which shared some of the features of finite groups. One recurrent theme appearing in his work was the relationship between the structure of groups and their subgroups consisting of elements fixed by particular automorphisms.
Hartley is perhaps best known by undergraduates for his book Rings Modules and Linear Algebra, with Trevor Hawkes (ISBN 9780412098109).
Hartley was a keen hill walker, and it was while descending Helvellyn in the English Lake District that he collapsed with a heart attack and died.
The 'Brian Hartley Room' at the School of Mathematics at Manchester is named in his honour.
*Wik

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1942 Arthur Taylor Winfree (May 15, 1942 – November 5, 2002) was a theoretical biologist at the University of Arizona. He was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States.
Winfree was noted for his work on the mathematical modeling of biological phenomena: from cardiac arrhythmia and circadian rhythms to the self-organization of slime mold colonies and the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction. Winfree was a MacArthur Fellow from 1984 to 1989 and shared the 2000 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics with Alexandre Chorin. *Wik
Among numerous awards he was a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Finalist in 1960, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship awardee in 1982, and shared the AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics with A. Chorin in 2000. His obituary in Siam began: "When Art Winfree died in Tucson on November 5, 2002, at the age of 60, the world lost one of its most creative scientists. I think he would have liked that simple description: scientist. After all, he made it nearly impossible to categorize him any more precisely than that. He started out as an engineering physics major at Cornell (1965), but then swerved into biology, receiving his PhD from Princeton in 1970. Later, he held faculty positions in theoretical biology (Chicago, 1969-72), in the biological sciences (Purdue, 1972-1986), and in ecology and evolutionary biology (University of Arizona, from 1986 until his death). " *SIAM
He was the father of Erik Winfree, another MacArthur Fellow and currently a professor at the California Institute of Technology, and Rachael Winfree, currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at Rutgers University.

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1964 Sijue Wu (May 15, 1964 - ) She received her B.S. (1983) and M.S. (1986) from Beijing University, Beijing, China, and her Ph.D. (1990) [Abstract] from Yale University. Since then she has held the following position: Courant Instructor at Courant Institute, New York University (2 years); assistant professor at Northwestern University (4 years); and assistant, then associate professor at the University of Iowa (2 years). She was also a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1992 and during the year 1996-97. She has been as associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, since 1998.
Sijue Wu was awarded the 2001 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize by the American Mathematics Society. This prize is awarded every two years to recognize an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the previous five years. Following is the selection committee's citation:
The Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics is awarded to Sijue Wu for her work on a long-standing problem in the water wave equation, in particular for the results in her papers (1) "Well-posedness in Sovolev spaces of the full water wave problem in 2-D", Invent. Math. 130 (1997), 39-72; and (2) "Well-posedness in Sobolev spaces of the full water wave problem in 3-D", J. Amer. Math. Soc. 12, no. 2 (1999), 445-495. By applying tools from harmonic analysis (singular integrals and Clifford algebra), she proves that the Taylor sign condition always holds and that there exists a unique solution to the water wave equations for a finite time interval when the initial wave profile is a Jordon surface. *Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College

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DEATHS

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1751  John Bonnycastle (baptized 29 December 1751 in Hardwick or Whitchurch, England – 15 May 1821 in Woolwich, England) was an English teacher of mathematics and author.

John Bonnycastle was born in Buckinghamshire, in about 1750. Nothing is known of his family or early life, but he went to London where he established an Academy. He became a tutor to the two sons of the Earl of Pontefract at Easton in Northumberland. Between 1782 and 1785, he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where he remained until his death on 15 May 1821.

He was a prolific writer, and wrote for the early volumes of Rees's Cyclopædia, about algebra, analysis and astronomy.

On Oct.7th, 1786 he married Brigette Newell with whom he had six children Charlotte, William, Mary, Sir Richard (Royal Engineer/Author), Humphrey and Charles.

His son Richard Henry Bonnycastle settled in Canada, where the family became quite well known in Winnipeg and Calgary.

His son, Charles Bonnycastle (1796-1840) became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia.

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1833 Bewick Bridge (1767, Linton, Cambridgeshire – 15 May 1833, Cherry Hinton) was an English vicar and mathematical author.
In 1786, he was admitted as a sizar to study mathematics Peterhouse, Cambridge University, where he graduated as senior wrangler and won the Smith's Prize in 1790.
In October 1790, he was ordained a deacon at Ely, and became a priest in 1792; in the same year he became a Fellow at Peterhouse, during which he spent time as both as college moderator and as proctor. From 1806 until 1816, he was Professor of Mathematics at the East India Company College, Haileybury. He wrote a number of mathematical texts: his Algebra achieved international circulation. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1812.
From 1816 until 1833, he was vicar of Cherry Hinton in Cambridge, where in 1818 he built the vicarage, and he founded the village school in 1832 (now a Church of England PrimarySchool). He died on 15 May 1833, aged 66. In September 2011 the Cherry Hinton Community Junior School was named after Bewick, becoming Bewick Bridge Community Primary School. *Wik

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1907  Anne Lucy Bosworth Focke (September 29, 1868 – May 15, 1907) was an American mathematician who became the first mathematics professor at what is now the University of Rhode Island, and later became the first female doctoral student of David Hilbert.

Bosworth attended Woonsocket High School, and graduated from Wellesley College in 1890.  At Wellesley, her classmates included mathematicians Grace Andrews and Clara Latimer Bacon.

She worked for two years as a teacher at Amesbury High School in Massachusetts, and was appointed as an instructor of mathematics at the Rhode Island College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (later to become the University of Rhode Island) in early 1892, the first year the school became a college. One month later she became its professor of mathematics and physics.

While continuing to work at the college, Bosworth earned a master's degree at the University of Chicago from 1894 through 1896 through summer study with E. H. Moore and Oskar Bolza.

In 1898, taking a leave from her work for the college, Bosworth traveled to the University of Göttingen in Germany, where she worked under the supervision of David Hilbert. She defended her dissertation there in 1899, and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1900. Her dissertation was Begründung einer vom Parallelenaxiome unabhängigen Streckenrechnung, and concerned non-Euclidean geometry. She was David Hilbert's first female doctoral student, part of a group that later included Nadeschda Gernet (1902), Vera Myller (1906), Margarete Kahn (1909), Klara Löbenstein (1910), and Eva Koehler (1912).  *Wik

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1923  Arthur Gordon Webster (November 28, 1863 - May 15, 1923) was the founder of the American Physical Society.  A group of twenty physicists, invited by Webster, founded the American Physical Society at a meeting at Fayerweather Hall in Columbia University on 20 May 1899. In 1903, Webster became president of the American Physical Society and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Webster committed suicide in 1923, following the closure of the mathematics department at Clark, after it was rumored that the physics department would be the next to be closed by the new president. With a revolver he had bought a few hours before, Webster shot himself twice in the head in his private office while a class waited for him next door. He left a note to his son which read;
Dear Gordon: This is the only way. For years I have been a failure - my research is worth nothing. Everyone else knows it, and S.N. physics has got away from me and I cannot come back. Everything I have started has stalled. Students will not come and they will put me out. Your mother will not see. She will get over this. Take care of her. I am sorry for the trouble I have caused you. Am sorry to make so much trouble. Do your best and tell the truth. With my best love, "Papa"*Wik (with thanks to Arjen Dijksman).

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1975 Taira Honda (本田 平 Honda Taira?, 2 June 1932 Fukui, Japan – 15 May 1975 Osaka, Japan) was a Japanese mathematician working on number theory who proved the Honda–Tate theorem classifying abelian varieties over finite fields. *Wik His mathematical research was mainly devoted to the investigation of the arithmetic properties of commutative formal groups. A brilliant career was cut short when he took his own life.*SAU

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1991 Andreas Floer (23 Aug 1956 in Duisburg, Germany - 15 May 1991 in Bochum, Germany) was a German mathematician who made seminal contributions to the areas of geometry, topology, and mathematical physics, in particular the invention of Floer homology.

Floer's first pivotal contribution was a solution of a special case of Arnold's conjecture on fixed points of a symplectomorphism. Because of his work on Arnold's conjecture and his development of instanton homology, he achieved wide recognition and was invited as a plenary speaker for the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Kyoto in August 1990. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1989.*Wik

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2008 Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist and joint winner, with Polykarp Kusch, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." His experimental work spurred refinements in the quantum theories of electromagnetic phenomena.*TIS The Lamb shift was an energy difference between the ²S_½ and ²P_½ energy levels of the hydrogen atom. According to the current theory, these two levels should have the same amount of energy, but when the electrons were exposed to a magnetic field, the energy level of ²S_½ was slightly different. This discovery led to the renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics. *This Day in Science History

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2019  Dionisio Gallarati (May 8, 1923 – May 13, 2019) was an Italian mathematician, who specialised in algebraic geometry. He was a major influence on the development of algebra and geometry at the University of Genova.

 Gallarati joined the University of Pisa in 1941. His studies being interrupted by the war, he received his first degree from Genova.

He started his research career at l'Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica in Rome, where he was taught by Giacomo Albanese, Leonard Roth, Leonida Tonelli, E. G. Togliatti, Beniamino Segre and Francesco Severi.

He took a post at Genova in 1947, where he stayed until he retired in 1987.

Gallarati published 64 papers between 1951 and 1996.

Important among his research was the study of surfaces in P3 with multiple isolated singularities. His lower bounds for maximal number of nodes of surfaces of degree n stood for a long time, and exact solutions for large n were still unknown in 2001.

In Grassmannian geometry he extended Segre's bound "for the number of linearly independent complexes containing the curve in the Grassmannian corresponding to the tangent lines of a nondegen *Wikerate projective curve."[3] He extended the results to arbitrarily dimensioned varieties' tangent spaces, to higher degree complexes, and to arbitrary curves in Grassmannians corresponding to degenerate scrolls. *Wik

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