Mathematicians Of The Day

4th December



On this day in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli first mentioned in a letter his theoretical evidence that conservation laws required the existence of a new particle which he proposed to call the "neutron". Pauli's particle was named the "neutrino" by Fermi in 1934 and it was later found experimentally.

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Quotation of the day

From Thomas Hobbes
He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. He read the proposition . "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry.
A quotation about Thomas Hobbes by John Aubrey (1626-1697). Quoted in O L Dick, Brief Lives (Oxford 1960)