MacTutor
Mathematicians Of The Day
27th June
On this day in 1908, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences announced a prize of one hundred thousand marks, from the will of Paul Wolfskehl, for a proof of Fermat's last theorem. Thousands of attempts at a proof were submitted. The prize would have been worth about a million pounds in today's money, but when Andrew Wiles collected the prize in 1997 it was about 75 000 DM.
Click on Ⓟ for a poster.
Born:
- 1767: Alexis Bouvard Ⓟ
- 1806: Augustus De Morgan Ⓟ
- 1826: Morgan Crofton Ⓟ
- 1834: Erastus De Forest Ⓟ
- 1850: Jorgen Gram Ⓟ
- 1853: John Kerr
- 1864: Charles Joly Ⓟ
- 1868: Charles Tweedie
- 1899: Lois Griffiths Ⓟ
- 1915: Aleksandr Yakovlevich Povzner Ⓟ
- 1940: Daniel Quillen Ⓟ
Died:
- 1831: Sophie Germain Ⓟ
- 1880: Carl Borchardt Ⓟ
- 1883: William Spottiswoode Ⓟ
- 1952: Max Dehn Ⓟ
- 1975: Geoffrey Taylor Ⓟ
- 1982: Tadija Pejovic Ⓟ
- 1989: Newby Curle Ⓟ
Quotation of the day
From Augustus De Morgan
The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.
