I enjoy reading about mathematics history. One of my favorite websites for this is http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Day_files/Now.html hosted by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Today’s mathematician births and deaths are shown below. This page also has some quotations from the day’s featured mathematicians. The MAA also has a nice page http://mathdl.maa.org. A listing from the MAA about today is shown below also.
I also enjoy reading a theorem for the day. Check out http://www.theoremoftheday.org/display/ by Robin Whitty for today’s theorem.
Do you know of any other good websites with information for “This Day in Mathematics History”?
| Mathematicians born on this day:1707 : Buffon 1819 : Bouquet 1901 : Robb 1903 : Dudley Littlewood 1915 : Ito 1948 : Praeger 1955 : Zelmanov |
Mathematicians who died on this day:1682 : Caramuel 1918 : Sylow 1936 : Grossmann 1947 : Cipolla 1951 : Harry Schmidt 1985 : Pólya 2003 : David Spence |
| 1707 | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, born in Cote d’Or, France. Buffon’s needle experiment used probability to estimate pi. He introduced calculus into probability theory.More information about: Georges Buffon Buffon’s Needle |
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| 1918 | Ludwig Sylow died in Christiania (Oslo), Norway. He proved the famous Sylow theorems of group theory in 1872.More information about: Peter Ludwig Sylow |
| 1923 | The AMS adopted a resolution “sanctioning the establishment of a lectureship to be known as the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship, the lecture to deal in semi-popular form with some aspect of mathematics or its applications.”More information about: American Mathematical Society Gibbs Lecturers |
| 1930 | Kurt Godel announced his famous Incompleteness Theorem — that there are true but unprovable statements in arithmetic — in a discussion on the foundations of mathematics organized by the Vienna Circle.More information about: Kurt Godel Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem |