Holicong

 THE MONTH IN MATH:  April

April 1:

Math News: In 1896, member of congress James Garfield (future president) constructs a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.  (See MathDL for details.)

Birthdays: Sophie Germain (1776-1831)

April 3:

Birthdays: Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984)

Deaths: Joseph Bertrand (1822-1900)

April 4:

Birthdays: Edouard Lucas (1842-1891)

Deaths: John Napier (1550-1617)

April 5:

Birthdays: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

April 6:

Math News: In 1922, Emmy Noether is named “unofficial associate professor” at the University of Göttingen.  (See MathDL for details.)

Deaths: Niels Abel (1802-1829)

April 8:

Math News: In 1796, Gauss completes the first of his six proofs of the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity.  (See MathDL for details.)

Birthdays: David Rittenhouse (1732-1796)

Deaths: Lorand Eotvos (1848-1919)

April 9:

Math News: In 1810, Pierre-Simon Laplace first presents his Central Limit Theorem.  (See MathDL for details.)

Birthdays: Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936), George Peacock (1791-1858)

Deaths: William of Ockham (1288-1348)

April 10:

Deaths: Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)

April 11:

Birthdays: Andrew Wiles (1953-present)

April 12:

Math News: In 1961, Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.

Birthdays: Ferdinand von Lindemann (1852-1939)

April 13:

Birthdays: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

April 14:

Birthdays: Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695)

Deaths: Emmy Noether (1882-1935)

April 15:

Birthdays: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) – Click here to read my post about Euler, Hermann Grassmann (1809-1877)

April 16:

Math News: In 1705, Isaac Newton is knighted by Queen Anne.  (See MathDL for details.)

Birthdays: Gotthold Eisenstein (1823-1852)

Deaths: Georges Buffon (1707-1788)

April 17:

Deaths: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

April 18:

Math News: In 1796, Gauss’s discovery of the constructibility of regular polygons is made public by E.A.W. Zimmerman.  (See MathDLfor details.)

Deaths: Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

April 20:

Deaths: Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932)

April 21:

Birthdays: Michel Rolle (1652-1719)

Deaths: John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)

April 22:

Birthdays: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

April 23:

Birthdays: Max Planck (1858-1947)

April 25:

Birthdays: Felix Klein (1849-1925), Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

Deaths: Simeon Poisson (1781-1840)

April 26:

Birthdays: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Deaths: Carl B. Boyer (1906-1976), Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951)

April 27:

Birthdays: Paul Gordan (1837-1912)

April 28:

Math News: In 1693, Leibniz writes a letter to L’Hospital explaining his discovery of determinants.  In 1817, Gauss writes to Olbers about his lack of confidence in Euclidean geometry as the only possible geometry, stating that “I am becoming more and more convinced that the necessity of our (Euclidean) geometry cannot be proved, at least not by human intellect nor for the human intellect.”  It is this insight that will eventually give birth to non-Euclidean geometry.   (See MathDL for details.)

Birthdays: Kurt Godel (1906-1978)

Deaths: William Wallace (1768-1843)

April 29:

Birthdays: Henri Poincaré (1854-1912)

Deaths: Charles-Julien Brianchon (1783-1864), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

April 30:

Birthdays: Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) – Click here to read my post about Gauss

References: If you are interested in additional facts or birthdays, please visit the sites that I used to generate these lists:

• http://mathdl.maa.org – general mathematical facts
• http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk:80/~history/Day_files/Now.html – birthdays