1781 – Poisson – bio
Simeon Denis Poisson was born in 1781 in France and was a mathematician and physicist. He did work with integrals, differential equations and fourier analysis that laid foundations for many mathematicians who came later. Poisson’s “Treatise on Mechanics”, published in 1811, included work not just on mechanics but also key equations describing electricity and magnetism. [...]
1834 – soliton
A soliton is a waveform that appears more like a lump or pulse than a conventional wave. In 1834, a Scottish engineer named Scott Russell noticed that the bow wave caused by a boat in a canal continued after the boat was suddenly stopped. Russell followed the wave on horseback for over a mile along [...]
1802 – Abel – bio
Niels Henrik Abel was born in 1802 in Norway and became a mathematician. He tried and failed to find a solution for the quintic equation and then completed Ruffini’s incomplete proof that it could not always be solved using radicals. This is now known as Abel’s impossibility theorem or the Abel–Ruffini theorem. Jacobi and Abel [...]
1765 – Ruffini – bio
Paolo Ruffini was born in Italy in 1765 and was a mathematician. After the cubic equation was solved in 1539 by del Ferro, Tartaglia and Cardano, and Ferrari had solved the quartic equation by 1545, mathematicians turned their attention toward attempting to solve the quintic. The previous polynomial equations (quadratic, cubic and quartic) had all [...]
1773 – Young – bio
Thomas Young was born in 1773 in England and made important contributions in several areas of physics and also did significant work in many other fields, including: music, Egyptology and physiology. Grimaldi collected some of the earliest observations of the diffraction, or bending of light as it passes an obstacle. Newton studied this, but concluded [...]
1792 – Lobachevsky – bio
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was born in 1792 in Russia and became a mathematician known for developing non-euclidian geometry. He also found a method for approximating roots of algebraic equations that is now known as the Dandelin-Graffe method. Lobachevsky, Bolyai and Gauss all appear to have independently discovered the form of non-euclidean geometry called hyperbolic geometry [...]
1793 – cotton gin
In 1793, Eli Whitney created an improved version of a mechanical device designed to separate cotton seeds from cotton fiber prior to processing the fiber into cotton thread and weaving the thread into cloth. Prior devices that served a similar function existed for over a thousand years but were not very efficient. The term “gin” [...]
1887 – E8
In 1887, Willhelm Killing came up with a classification scheme for Lie algebras. The designation E-8 was eventually applied to an exceptional, simple Lie algegra and the associated Lie group of rank 8 and dimension 248. This is one of the most complex objects known to mankind. Mathematicians Map E8 – [aimath.org] Mathematicians have mapped [...]
1845 – Clifford – bio
William Clifford was born in 1845 in England and was a mathematician who created geometric algebra and suggested a geometric theory of gravity that Einstein adopted and developed in relativity theory. PRECURSOR: -0300 Euclid 1643 – Newton 1777 – Gauss 1792 – Lobachevsky 1802 – Bolyai 1805 – Hamilton 1809 – Grassman 1826 – Riemann [...]
1777 – Oersted – bio
Hans Christian Oersted was born in 1777 in Denmark and was a physicist and chemist. He has been given historical credit for noticing that electric currents can induce magnetic fields, thus creating the concept of “electromagnetism”. While Romagnosi discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism about twenty years earlier, he did not investigate it in [...]
