MacTutor
Mathematicians Of The Day
17th March
On this day in 1694, Guillaume de l'Hôpital sent a letter to Johann Bernoulli with a remarkable proposition:-
I will be happy to give you a retainer of 300 pounds, beginning with the first of January of this year. ... I promise shortly to increase this retainer, which I know is very modest, as soon as my affairs are somewhat straightened out. ... I am not so unreasonable as to demand in return all of your time, but I will ask you to give me at intervals some hours of your time to work on what I request and also to communicate to me your discoveries, at the same time asking you not to disclose any of them to others. I ask you even not to send here to Mr Varignon or to others any copies of the writings you have left with me; if they are published, I will not be at all pleased. Answer me regarding all this ...The postage stamp of one of today's mathematicians at THIS LINK was issued in 1984.
Click on Ⓟ for a poster.
Born:
- 1876: Ernest Esclangon Ⓟ
- 1897: Charles Fox Ⓟ
- 1915: Wolfgang Doeblin Ⓟ
Died:
- 1652: Benjamin Bramer Ⓟ
- 1782: Daniel Bernoulli Ⓟ
- 1808: Carl Friedrich Hindenburg
- 1846: Wilhelm Bessel Ⓟ
- 1853: Christian Doppler Ⓟ
- 1921: Nikolai Egorovich Zhukovskii Ⓟ
- 1922: Heinrich Suter Ⓟ
- 1946: Alexander Morgan
- 1955: Georges Valiron
- 1956: Henry Baker Ⓟ
- 1962: Wilhelm Blaschke Ⓟ
- 1964: Henry Sheffer Ⓟ
- 2003: Buqing Su Ⓟ
- 2007: John Backus Ⓟ
- 2012: Gary Roach Ⓟ
Quotation of the day
From John Backus
Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 [an early computer], writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.
