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Mathematicians Of The Day
3rd January
On this day in 1657, Pierre de Fermat made a challenge to the mathematicians of Europe and England. He posed two problems, involving S(n), the sum of the proper divisors of n:
1. Find a cube n such that n + S(n) is a square.
2. Find a square n such that n + S(n) is a cube.
Frenicle de Bessy found solutions to these on the day he was given the problems.
The postage stamp of one of today's mathematicians at THIS LINK was issued in 1982.
1. Find a cube n such that n + S(n) is a square.
2. Find a square n such that n + S(n) is a cube.
Frenicle de Bessy found solutions to these on the day he was given the problems.
The postage stamp of one of today's mathematicians at THIS LINK was issued in 1982.
Click on Ⓟ for a poster.
Born:
- 1777: Louis Poinsot Ⓟ
- 1788: Enno Heeren Dirksen Ⓟ
- 1912: Cora Ratto de Sadosky Ⓟ
- 1917: Yurii Alekseevich Mitropolskii Ⓟ
- 1921: Jean-Louis Koszul Ⓟ
- 1924: Clive William Kilmister Ⓟ
- 1926: David Spence Ⓟ
Died:
- 1641: Jeremiah Horrocks Ⓟ
- 1891: John Casey Ⓟ
- 1892: Heinrich Schröter Ⓟ
- 1912: Jacob Amsler Ⓟ
- 1920: Zygmunt Janiszewski Ⓟ
- 1927: Carl Runge Ⓟ
- 1960: Georges Darmois Ⓟ
- 1972: Władysław Ślebodziński Ⓟ
- 1989: Sergei Sobolev Ⓟ
- 2004: José Escobar
- 2011: Anatolii Volodymyrovych Skorokhod Ⓟ
Quotation of the day
From Louis Poinsot
Everyone makes for himself a clear idea of the motion of a point, that is to say, of the motion of a corpuscle which one supposes to be infinitely small, and which one reduces by thought in some way to a mathematical point.
