[after proving Euler’s formula e π i + 1 = 0 in a lecture] Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it is the truth. ~Benjamin Peirce
The 279th day of the year; Every positive integer is the sum of at most 279 eighth powers. See Waring’s problem
279 = 3^2 + 3^3 + 3^5 (powers are consecutive primes). *Derek Orr
279 = 1^2 + 2^2 + 7^2 + 15^2, It can not be done with fewer positive squares. (But is that the ONLY sum of four squares?)
279 = 48^2 - 45^2, and also 140^2 - 139^2 and because it has two factors of 3, 279 = 20^2 - 11^2.
EVENTS
1570 Cardano imprisoned for 87 days on charges of…
[after proving Euler’s formula e π i + 1 = 0 in a lecture] Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it is the truth. ~Benjamin Peirce
The 279th day of the year; Every positive integer is the sum of at most 279 eighth powers. See Waring’s problem
279 = 3^2 + 3^3 + 3^5 (powers are consecutive primes). *Derek Orr
279 = 1^2 + 2^2 + 7^2 + 15^2, It can not be done with fewer positive squares. (But is that the ONLY sum of four squares?)
279 = 48^2 - 45^2, and also 140^2 - 139^2 and because it has two factors of 3, 279 = 20^2 - 11^2.
EVENTS
1570 Cardano imprisoned for 87 days on charges of impiety (casting a horoscope of Christ). He spent the remaining five years of his life in Rome under the eye of a suspicious pope who nonetheless gave him a pension. See “Girolamo Cardano’s Horoscope of Christ,” pp. 53–90 in Renaissance Curiosa by Wayne Shumaker, especially p. 55 *VFR
Gerolamo Cardano was the first European mathematician to make systematic use of negative numbers.[14] He published with attribution the solution of Scipione del Ferro to the cubic equation and the solution of Cardano’s student Lodovico Ferrari to the quartic equation in his 1545 book Ars Magna, an influential work on algebra. The solution to one particular case of the cubic equation,ax^3+bx+c=0 (in modern notation) had been communicated to him in 1539 by Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia (who later claimed that Cardano had sworn not to reveal it, and engaged Cardano in a decade-long dispute) in the form of a poem, but del Ferro’s solution predated Tartaglia’s. In his exposition, he acknowledged the existence of what are now called imaginary numbers, although he did not understand their properties, described for the first time by his Italian contemporary Rafael Bombelli. In Opus novum de proportionibus he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem.
Cardano was notoriously short of money and kept himself solvent by being an accomplished gambler and chess player. His book about games of chance, Liber de ludo aleae (“Book on Games of Chance”), written around 1564, but not published until 1663, contains the first systematic treatment of probability, as well as a section on effective cheating methods. He used the game of throwing dice to understand the basic concepts of probability. He demonstrated the efficacy of defining odds as the ratio of favourable to unfavourable outcomes (which implies that the probability of an event is given by the ratio of favourable outcomes to the total number of possible outcomes).[19] He was also aware of the multiplication rule for independent events but was not certain about what values should be multiplied. *Wik
1651 Sir Charles Cavendish writes to John Pell about Thomas Harriot’s Doctrine of Triangular Numbers; “Sr. Th Alesburie remembers him to you & desires to know if you would be pleased to shew the use of Mr. Harriots doctrine of triangulare numbers; which if you will doe, he will send you the original; I confess I was so farre in loue with it that I coppied it out; though I doute I vnderstand it not all; much less the many vses which I assure myself you will finde of it.” *Thomas Harriot’s Doctrine of Triangular Numbers, Beery &Stedall, pg 3
1686 (Oct 16 NS) Wallis writes to thank Oldenburg for gift of “Lalovera’s book” (La Loubere,De la Louvere),veterum geometria promota, in septem de cycloide libris(1660). De la Louvere is often cited as the first man to bring the “Siamese” method of solving nxn odd magic squares to the West. *Philip Beeley, Christoph J. Scriba; Correspondence of John Wallis; ;The Siamese method, is a simple method to construct any size ofn-odd magic squares (i.e. number squares in which the sums of all rows, columns and diagonals are identical).La Loubere was returning from his 1687 embassy to the kingdom of Siam. The method was printed in another book by La Loubere in 1693 *Wik The book mentioned by Wallis was after a conflict with Pascal over his Cycloid prize problems. De la Louvere is considered one of the precursors of modern integral calculus and was well known to the other mathematicians of the time. His most important work is the Quadratura circuli (1651), in which he finds volumes and centroids by inverting Guldin’s rule. He moved from mathematics to theology until in 1658 he became embroiled in a dispute with Pascal over his solution for the problem of the “Roulette” (cycloid) posed by Pascal. Pascal’s accusation that he plagiarized Roberval’s solution was without foundation but the episode did bring de la Louvere back to geometry. De la Louvere found the solution to be what he called a “cyclocylindrique” (helix), described in the work sent to Wallis . Thus, de la Louvere became “the first mathematician to study the properties of the helix,” according to W. W. Ball in his History of Mathematics
1729 The first known letter which contains an interpolating function for the factorials was written by Daniel Bernoulli on October 6, 1729. Bernoulli suggests for an arbitrary (positive) x and an infinite number A the infinite product
(A+x^2)x−1∗((21+x)∗(32+x)∗...∗(AA−1+x)
In 1783, the self-winding clock was patented by Benjamin Hanks.*TISBenjamin Hanks patented the self-winding clock today when he obtained a 14-year intellectual rights patent for the apparatus that could wind itself and operate by the use of air. Plus, it would automatically continue to wind itself up and operate until the mechanical parts wore out due to friction.Oct 6, 2022
1807 Humphry Davy first isolated potassium by electrolysis of molten KCl in the basement of Royal Institute. *Anthony Hardwicke Tweet
1860 J. J. Sylvester, in a dinner invitation for Thomas Archer Hirst to join him with Arthur Cayley and Sylvester’s “young French mathematical friend”, (Camille Jordan); Sylvester entices him with a bit of mathematics, “I shall have something very striking to tell you about algebraic quantities of any order of irrationality and their representation by multiple definite integrals when we meet.” *James Joseph Sylvester: Life and Work in Letters, edited by Karen Hunger Parshall
1983 Lotus Development Corp. went public after recording revenues of $12.8 million for the previous 12 months. The company, founded by Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs in 1982, found its success with Kapor’s spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3 . Lotus 1-2-3 bypassed the operating system of the IBM PC, making it much faster than its competitors. In addition, its combination of spreadsheet capabilities with graphics and data retrieval made the program popular. IBM acquired Lotus in 1995.*CHM
1994Fermat confirmed, FINALLY. Wiles sends corrected proof. Over the course of three lectures delivered at Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences on June 21, 22, and 23 of 1993, Andres Wiles had announced his proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture, and hence of Fermat’s Last Theorem. There was a relatively large amount of press coverage afterward. (Nick) Katz was a referee on his manuscript and he asked Wiles a series of questions that led Wiles to recognize that the proof contained a gap. There was an error in a critical portion of the proof which gave a bound for the order of a particular group: the Euler system used to extend Flach’s method was incomplete. Wiles and his former student Richard Taylor spent almost a year resolving it. Wiles indicates that on the morning of September 19, 1994, he realized that the specific reason why the Flach approach would not work directly suggested a new approach with the Iwasawa theory which resolved all of the previous issues with the latter and resulted in a CNF that was valid for all of the required cases. On 6 October Wiles sent the new proof to three colleagues including Faltings. The new proof was published and, despite its size, widely accepted as likely correct in its major components. *Wik
In 1995, the first discovery of a planet around a star similar to the sun was announced (about 160 times the mass of the Earth around the star 51 Pegasus).*TIS
NASA’s Exoplanet Archive/press release reports the confirmed exoplanet tally has just reached ~6,000 (milestone announced Sept. 17–19, 2025).
2008 First Space object observed before it hit the earth. At 06:38 UTC on October 6, astronomers at the University of Arizona discovered an object provisionally called 8TA9D69 that appeared to be on a collision course with Earth. Three other observatories reported sightings within the next few hours – Sabino Canyon in Arizona and Siding Spring Observatory and a Royal Astronomical Society site, both in Australia. Together these four observers provided enough data on the object so that a Minor Planet Electronic Circular was issued at 14:59 UTC the same day, giving 8TA9D69 the more formal name 2008 TC3, and advising the astronomical community that “The nominal orbit given above has 2008 TC3 coming to within one earth radius around Oct. 7.1. The absolute magnitude indicates that the object will not survive passage through the atmosphere. Steve Chesley (JPL) reports that atmospheric entry will occur on 2008 Oct 07 0246 UTC over northern Sudan.” The object wouldn’t be more than a big meteor, but even so, it represented the first time ever that an object had been observed before it was to hit Earth, and, clearly, astronomers around the world scrambled to their telescopes to observe it before it was to pass into Earth’s shadow (and, therefore, invisibility) just before 01:50 UTC. *The Planetary SocietyAnimation of 2008
BIRTHS
1552****Matteo Ricci (October 6, 1552; Macerata – May 11, 1610;Beijing )was an Italian Jesuit who went to China as a missionary and introduced the Chinese to Western mathematics.*SAU
There is now a memorial plaque in Zhaoqing to commemorate Ricci’s six-year stay there, as well as a “Ricci Memorial Centre”, in a building dating from the 1860’s. *Wik
Ricci was born in Macerata, in the Papal States (Italy), on October 6, 1552.He studied law briefly in Rome before joining the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1571.
At the Jesuit Roman College, he was trained in mathematics and astronomy under Christoph Clavius, a major architect of the Gregorian calendar reform. This scientific background later proved crucial in China, where intellectual authority was tied closely to astronomy and mathematics.
Ricci developed what became known as the “accommodation” strategy.He dressed and behaved like a Confucian scholar rather than a European priest.He emphasized dialogue, respect for Chinese traditions, and the teaching of Western sciences as a way of building credibility.He translated important Western texts into Chinese and Chinese classics into Latin, positioning himself as a cultural intermediary rather than a conqueror.
Mathematics: Ricci introduced Euclidean geometry to Chinese scholars. His Chinese translation of Elements (with Xu Guangqi, a Chinese scholar-official and later convert) became foundational for mathematics in China.
Cartography: He produced world maps (such as the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, 1602) that incorporated European geographical knowledge. These maps amazed the Chinese elite by showing lands beyond Asia in scientific detail.
Astronomy & Calendar Reform: Ricci’s training allowed Jesuits to contribute to the highly prestigious task of calendar reform, helping them gain favor at the imperial court.
Language & Translation: He compiled a Portuguese–Chinese dictionary and was among the first Europeans to achieve real fluency in written and spoken Chinese.
Influence at the Ming Court
By 1601, Ricci had gained permission to live in Beijing, becoming the first Westerner invited to the Forbidden City. *PB
1732 Nevil Maskelyne (6 Oct 1732, 9 Feb 1811) (SAU gives 5 Oct for birthdate) British astronomer noted for his contribution to the science of navigation. In 1761 the Royal Society sent Maskelyne to the island of St Helena to make accurate measurements of a transit of Venus. This, in turn, gives the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and the scale of the solar system. During the voyage he also experimented with the lunar position method of determining longitude. In 1764 he went on a voyage to Barbados to carry out trials of Harrison’s timepiece, followed by appointment as Astronomer Royal (1765). In 1774, he carried out an experiment on a Scottish mountain with the use of a plumb line to determine the Earth’s density. He found it was approximately 4.5 times that of water. *TIS
1735 Jesse Ramsden (6 Oct 1735; 5 Nov 1800) British pioneer in the design of precision tools. At 23, Ramsden chose to apprentice to a maker of mathematical instruments. By age 27 he had his own business in London and was known as the most skilful designer of mathematical, astronomical, surveying and navigational instruments in the 18th Century. He is best known for the design of a telescope and microscope eyepiece (ocular) still commonly used today and bearing his name. The French scientist N. Cassegrain proposed a design of a reflecting telescope in 1672, but Ramsden, however, 100 years later, who found that this design reduces blurring of the image caused by the sphericity of the lenses or mirrors. He also built lathes, barometers, manometers and assay balances.*TIS
1784 Pierre Charles François Dupin (6 Oct 1784, 18 Jan 1873)made contributions to differential geometry and in particular invented the ‘Dupin indicatrix’ which gives an indication of the local behavior of a surface up to the terms of degree two. His contributions to differential geometry include the introduction of conjugate and asymptotic lines on a surface. *SAU
| *Wik |
1795 Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (6 Oct 1795, 17 Dec 1851) was a French mathematician best known for his formula for the Legendre polynomials.*SAU
1831 (Julius Wilhelm) Richard Dedekind(6 Oct 1831, 12 Feb 1916 at age 84) German mathematician who developed a major redefinition of irrational numbers in terms of arithmetic concepts. Although not fully recognized in his lifetime, his treatment of the ideas of the infinite and of what constitutes a real number continues to influence modern mathematics. *TIS A 1904 academic calendar marked September fourth, 1899 as the day Dedekind died. He wrote the publisher saying that while 4 September might be correct, 1899 certainly was not, for on that day he had enjoyed a stimulating mathematical discussion with his dinner guest and honored friend, Georg Cantor. *VFR
1866 Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (6 Oct 1866, 22 Jul 1932) Canadian inventor and engineer with 300 patents. He broadcast the first program of voice and music. In 1893, Fessenden moved to Pittsburgh as the head of electrical engineering at the university, Fessenden read of Marconi’s work and began experimenting himself. Marconi could only transmit Morse code. But Fessenden’s goal was to transmit the human voice and music. He invented the “continuous wave”: sound superimposed onto a radio wave for transmission. A radio receiver extracts the signal so the listener with the original sound. Fessenden made the first long-range transmissions of voice on Christmas Eve 1906 from a station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, heard hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic.*TIS
1893 Meghnad Saha FRS(6 October 1893 – 16 February 1956) was an Indian astrophysicist best known for his development of the Saha ionization equation, used to describe chemical and physical conditions in stars. Saha was the first scientist to relate a star’s spectrum to its temperature, developing thermal ionization equations that have been foundational in the fields of astrophysics and astrochemistry. He was repeatedly and unsuccessfully nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Saha was also politically active and was elected in 1952 to India’s parliament. *Wik
1903 Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton(6 Oct 1903; 25 Jun 1995) Irish physicist, who was co recipient, with Sir John Douglas Cockcroft of England, of the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of the first nuclear particle accelerator, known as the Cockcroft-Walton generator. The accelerator was built in a disused room in the Cavendish Laboratory, and supplied with several hundred kilovolts from a voltage multiplier circuit designed and built by Cockroft and Walton. On 14 Apr 1932 Walton turned the proton beam on to a lithium target. Despite all the odds against them, they succeeded in being the first to split the atom, and Walton was the first to see the reaction taking place. They identified the disintegration products as alpha particles (helium nuclei). *TIS
1908 Sergei Lvovich Sobolev (6 October 1908 – 3 January 1989) was a Soviet mathematician working in mathematical analysis and partial differential equations.*Wik
1918 Abraham Robinson (born Robinsohn; October 6, 1918 – April 11, 1974) was a mathematician who is most widely known for development of non-standard analysis, a mathematically rigorous system whereby infinitesimal and infinite numbers were incorporated into mathematics. Nearly half of Robinson’s papers were in applied mathematics rather than in pure mathematics. He is the creator of non-standard analysis.
He became known for his approach of using the methods of mathematical logic to attack problems in analysis and abstract algebra. He “introduced many of the fundamental notions of model theory”.[3] Using these methods, he found a way of using formal logic to show that there are self-consistent nonstandard models of the real number system that include infinite and infinitesimal numbers.
1925 Lloyd Kenneth Williams ( 6 October 1925, 18 November 2001) was an African American mathematician who taught at the University of San Francisco while studying for his doctorate at University of California at Berkeley. He served as Chair of Mathematics at several universities, ending has career at Texas Southern University in Houston.
was born, the second of three sons to migrant workers Coy and Corinne Williams in Bennington, Oklahoma. He was raised by his mother and stepfather L. D. James. For as long as he could remember, he was fascinated by numbers. But he had to endure poverty and enormous discrimination and personal tragedy.
He attended Langston University, Langston, Oklahoma, 1942-1944. In World War II, Williams joined the U.S. Navy (1944 - 1946). After the Navy, Williams entered the University of California, Berkeley, California in 1946 and earned his B. A. and M. A. in 1948 and 1949, respectively. After earning his Masters Degree he moved to Texas to teach at Prairie View College, where he subsequently met his wife, Wilmoth Loper, then Dean of Prairie View’s School of Nursing.
Employed as Mathematics Instructor, Grambling College, Grambling, Louisiana 1956 - 1957. Employed at Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as Chairman of the Mathematics Department, 1957 - 1961. Employed as Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Southern Illinois University, East Saint Louis, Illinois, 1961 - 1964. Employed at Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia, first as Professor and as Chair of the Mathematics Department, 1964 - 1975. In 1975 he joined Texas Southern University (Houston, Texas) as a Full Professor of Mathematics snd remained there until he retired in 1999. In 1985 he had a Fulbright Scholarship to study the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On Novemer 18, 2001, Dr. Williams died after a long bout with cancer.
Dr. Lloyd Williams devoted much of his spare time to tutoring and assisting people with preparation for their GED and for improving literacy. He loved Shakespear, especially Othello, and could often be found mouthing the text at performances, and he idolized Paul Robeson. He loved gospel music, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington.*Mathematician of the African Diaspora
1936 Robert Phelan Langlands (October 6, 1936 - ) is a Canadian mathematician best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory. He is an emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Langlands has received the 1996 Wolf Prize (which he shared with Andrew Wiles), the 2005 AMS Steele Prize, the 1980 Jeffery-Williams Prize, the 1988 NAS Award in Mathematics from the National Academy of Sciences, the 2006 Nemmers Prize in Mathematics, and the 2007 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences (with Richard Taylor) for his work on automorphic forms. *Wik Langlands occupies the office formerly held by Albert Einstein at Princeton. *Edward Frenkel, Love and Math
1950****Glen David Brin, (born October 6, 1950 - ) is an American scientist and award-winning author of science fiction. He has received the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards. Brin was born in Glendale, California in 1950. In 1973, he graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in astrophysics. He followed this with a Master of Science in applied physics in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in space science in 1981, both from the University of California, San Diego. He is a 2010 fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.*Wik
DEATHS
1809 Benjamin Peirce (4 Apr 1809, 6 Oct 1880) American astronomer, mathematician and educator who computed the general perturbations of the planets Uranus and Neptune. He was Harvard’s Perkins Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics for nearly 40 years, and was largely responsible for introducing mathematics as a subject for research in American institutions. He is known especially for his contributions to analytic mechanics and linear associative algebra, but he is also remembered for his early work in astronomy and for playing a role in the discovery of Neptune. *TIS In number theory, he proved there is no odd perfect number with fewer than four prime factors. In algebra, he was notable for the study of associative algebras. He first introduced the terms idempotent and nilpotent in 1870 to describe elements of these algebras, and he also introduced the Peirce decomposition. *Wik One of my favorite pictures of Peirce is this image with chalk globe.
1840 François Budan de Boislaurent (28 Sept 1761, 6 Oct 1840) was a Haitian born amateur mathematician best remembered for his discovery of a rule which gives necessary conditions for a polynomial equation to have n real roots between two given numbers. Budan is considered an amateur mathematician and he is best remembered for his discovery of a rule which gives necessary conditions for a polynomial equation to have n real roots between two given numbers. Budan’s rule was in a memoir sent to the Institute in 1803 but it was not made public until 1807 in Nouvelle méthode pour la résolution des équations numerique d’un degré quelconque. In it Budan wrote, “If an equation in x has n roots between zero and some positive number p, the transformed equation in (x - p) must have at least n fewer variations in sign than the original.” *SAU (Sounds like a nice followup extension to Descartes Rule of signs in Pre-calculus classes. Mention the history, how many times do your students hear about a Haitian mathematician?)
| Crelle Memorial in his hometown |
1855 August Leopold Crelle (11 Mar 1780; 6 Oct 1855 at age 75). Although always interested in mathematics he lacked the money to enroll at a university and so became an engineer instead. In 1826, when he had the money, he founded the Journal f¨ur die rein und angewandte Mathematik and edited fifty two volumes. Although not a great mathematician he had a gift for recognizing the abilities of such men as Abel, Jacobi, Steiner, Dirichlet, Pl¨ucker, M¨obius, Eisenstein, Kummer, and Weierstrass and offered to publish their papers in his journal. *VFR As a civil engineer in the service of the Prussian Government and worked on the construction and planning of roads and the first railway in Germany (completed in 1838). He founded (1826) the world’s oldest mathematical periodical still in existence, Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik (“Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics”), now known as Crelle’s Journal,and edited it for the rest of his life. In 1841, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.*TIS
1959****Balthasar van der Pol(27 January 1889 – 6 October 1959) was a Dutch physicist.
Van der Pol began his studies of physics in Utrecht in 1911. J. A. Fleming offered van der Pol the use of the Pender Electrical Laboratory at University College for a study of the heuristics of wireless reception on board ships. In England he also worked with J. J. Thomson. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Balthasar worked with Hendrik Lorentz at Teylers Stichting. For his thesis he wrote The effect of an ionised gas on electro-magnetic wave propagation and its application to radio, as demonstrated by glow-discharge measurement under the supervision of Willem Henri Julius. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1920. He joined Philips Research Laboratories in 1921, where he worked until his retirement in 1949.
As observed by Hendrik Casimir, “Radio might have remained a field of haphazard empiricism along with wild commercial ventures, but for the influence of men like van der Pol who stressed the need for a more scientific approach.”
The differential equations of coupled electrical systems drew his interest, and he developed the idea of “relaxation oscillations”. With J. van der Mark he applied the idea to the heartbeat, which provided one of the earliest quantitative models of the action potential. These studies led him to the van der Pol equation and Oliver Heaviside’s operational calculus for dealing with differential equations. He submitted articles to Philosophical Magazine on the operational calculus and, in coordination with H. Bremmer, wrote Modern Operational Calculus based on the Two-sided Laplace Integral, published by Cambridge University Press.
He was awarded the Institute of Radio Engineers (now the IEEE) Medal of Honor in 1935. The asteroid 10443 van der Pol was named after him.
Van der Pol became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949. *Wik
1968 Phyllis Nicolson(21 September 1917 – 6 October 1968) was a British mathematician and physicist best known for her work on the Crank–Nicolson method together with John Crank.
Nicolson was born Phyllis Lockett in Macclesfield and went to Stockport High School for Girls. She graduated from Manchester University with a B.Sc. in 1938, M.Sc. in 1939 and a Ph.D. on Three Problems in Theoretical Physics in 1946. Her Ph.D. thesis began with cosmic ray research conducted under Lajos Jánossy during 1939 and 1940.
Nicolson’s Ph.D. was expected to be submitted in 1941 but was interrupted by wartime work with Douglas Hartree’s research group at Manchester University from 1940 to 1945. During this time, Nicolson became a proficient numerical analyst and an expert user of Hartree’s differential analyser. Nicolson, along with other members of the research group worked on defence-related problems for the Air Defence Research and Development Establishment (later the Radar Research and Development Establishment), both part of the Ministry of Supply. Nicolson’s two significant bodies of wartime research, “Transient behaviour in the single anode magnetron” and “heat conduction”, formed the basis of parts II and III of her 1946 PhD thesis Three Problems in Theoretical Physics.
Nicolson’s research on heat conduction related to solutions of the heat equation, and with her colleague John Crank she investigated the numerical stability of several solution techniques. The algorithm now known as the Crank–Nicolson method emerged from this work and was published in 1947.
Nicolson was a research student in Cambridge from 1945 and completed her Ph.D. thesis completed at the Victoria University of Manchester (now Manchester University) in 1946. She was a Tucker-Price Research Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge from 1946 to 1949, working at the Cavendish Laboratory. Nicolson moved to Leeds around January 1950 with her husband Malcolm Nicolson, also a physicist, as he had been appointed to a lectureship in Physics at Leeds University. Phyllis Nicolson had married Malcolm in 1942 and they had two sons, Donald Macleod Nicolson (born 20 September 1947 in Cambridge) and Roderick Ian Nicolson (born 5 February 1950 in Leeds).
Malcolm Nicolson, aged 33, died in a train accident in December 1951, and Phyllis was appointed to take over his lectureship. In 1955, Nicolson married physicist Malcolm McCaig, who had a son Ian McCaig (born February 1946) from a previous marriage. In May 1957, Nicolson and McCaig had a son together, Andrew Malcolm McCaig. All three of Nicolson’s sons ended up getting PhDs – in mathematics, psychology, and geology
1979 Dudley Ernest Littlewood (7 September 1903, 6 October 1979) was a British mathematician known for his work in group representation theory.*SAU
He read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his tutor was John Edensor Littlewood (they were not related). He was a lecturer at University College, Swansea from 1928 to 1947, and in 1948 took up the chair of mathematics at University College of North Wales, Bangor, retiring in 1970.
He worked on invariant theory and group representation theory, especially of the symmetric group, often in collaboration with Archibald Read Richardson of Swansea. They introduced the immanant of a matrix, studied Schur functions and developed the Littlewood–Richardson rule for their multiplication. Littlewood was also interested in the application of representation theory to quantum mechanics. *Wik
Credits : *CHM=Computer History Museum *FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts *NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar *RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie *SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History *TIA = Today in Astronomy *TIS= Today in Science History *VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA *Wik = Wikipedia*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell