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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.
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.
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 Ⓟ
- 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.
