MacTutor
Mathematicians Of The Day
21st April
On this day in 1702, Maria Winckelmann became the first woman to discover a comet. Her husband Gottfried Kirch wrote:-
A (personally designed) stamp of one of today's mathematicians is at THIS LINK.
Early in the morning the sky was clear and starry. Some nights before I had observed a variable star, and my wife wanted to find and see it for herself. In so doing she found a comet in the sky. At which time she woke me and I found that it was indeed a comet ... I was surprised that I had not seen it the night before.In fact Kirch claimed the discovery for himself and did not give the above account until 1710.
A (personally designed) stamp of one of today's mathematicians is at THIS LINK.
Click on Ⓟ for a poster.
Born:
- 1652: Michel Rolle
- 1774: Jean-Baptiste Biot Ⓟ
- 1851: Alexander Macfarlane Ⓟ
- 1869: Philipp Furtwängler Ⓟ
- 1875: Teiji Takagi Ⓟ
- 1895: Archil Kirillovich Kharadze Ⓟ
- 1903: Isaac Schoenberg Ⓟ
- 1904: Jurjen Koksma Ⓟ
- 1909: Eduard Stiefel Ⓟ
- 1931: Robert C Thompson
- 1936: Richard Schelp Ⓟ
- 1946: Anzelm Iwanik Ⓟ
- 1951: Michael Freedman Ⓟ
Died:
- 1552: Petrus Apianus Ⓟ
- 1718: Philippe de la Hire Ⓟ
- 1825: Johann Friedrich Pfaff Ⓟ
- 1922: Alfred Kempe Ⓟ
- 1946: John Maynard Keynes Ⓟ
- 1954: Emil Post Ⓟ
- 1975: Lucien Godeaux Ⓟ
- 2005: William Kruskal Ⓟ
- 2008: Aleksandr Yakovlevich Povzner Ⓟ
- 2010: Herbert Federer Ⓟ
Quotation of the day
From John Maynard Keynes
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
