This Mathematical Month - May: A Brief Look at Past Events and Episodes in the Mathematical Community

Monthly postings of vignettes on people, publications, and mathematics to inform and entertain.

See information on the 2010 Calendar of Mathematical Imagery

May 1919: On the 12th of that month, Wu Wen-Tsun, one of the outstanding Chinese mathematicians of the twentieth century, was born in Shanghai. His initial university education was made difficult by the war between China and Japan. After the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II in 1945, Wu was able to restart his mathematics studies. The following year he met Shiing-Shen Chern, who was already an established mathematician with an international reputation and who was starting the Intsitute of Mathematics in the Academia Sinica. This was a crucial contact for Wu. The following year he traveled to France, where he studied for his doctorate at the University of Strasbourg, with Charles Ehresmann. Wu's work at this time centered on the topology of manifolds that underpins differential geometry. He discovered a set of invariants parallel to Chern classes, known as the Wu classes, which have proved nearly as important. He returned to China in 1951 and took a position at Peking University; two years later he became a researcher at the Academia Sinica. At this time his research continued to focus on topological problems. In 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, Wu was sent to work in a factory that manufactured computers. His deep interest in ancient Chinese mathematics, combined with the exposure to computers, led him to begin thinking about how to solve geometric problem in a mechanical way, and he wrote two influential monographs on the subject. Wu received various honors during his career, including two invitations to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians. In 2006, he shared the US$1-million Shaw Prize with David Mumford; Wu was recognized "for his contributions to the new interdisciplinary field of mathematics mechanization". In May 2009, Wu celebrates his 90th birthday. Find out more from the biography of Wu on the MacTutor History of Mathematics web site.

May 1908: One hundred years ago the May issue of the Bulletin of the AMS published "The Recently Discovered Manuscript by Archimedes," by Charles S. Slichter. The article begins, "Professor J. L. Heiberg has published two important accounts of his recent discovery of a new manuscript of Archimedes, both of which are of great interest to mathematicians. The first of these accounts is printed in volume 42 of Hermes. It contains the Greek text of a lost treatise of Archimedes, which is recovered nearly complete in the newly found manuscript. A German translation of the Greek text, and an interesting commentary by Zeuthen, is printed by Heiberg in the Bibliotheca Mathematica, volume 7, page 321." Today, one hundred years later, media have covered the most recent discoveries of the works of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes that first surfaced in the early 1900s--including those studied under a microscope by Danish philologist Johan Ludwig Heiberg, referred to in the 1909 Bulletin.

Readers may now view online the first century of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, from 1891 to 1991, searchable and fully integrated with the modern Bulletin. The approximately 84,000 pages of the Bulletin are freely accessible to all.

May 1957: Scientific American magazine publishes an article introducing the general public to polyominoes, which are generalizations of dominoes. In fact, the term "polyomino" had been coined three years earlier by Solomon Golomb, who created puzzles based on polyominoes and wrote about them in the American Mathematical Monthly. But the fame of polyominoes increased enormously when Martin Gardner wrote about them in the May 1957 installment of his "Mathematical Games" columns. Eight years after that, Scribner's published a book by Golomb called Polyominoes, which has become a classic in recreational mathematics and was reprinted in a new edition by Princeton University Press in 1994. Polyominoes are the basis for the popular computer game "Tetris" and are often used in precollege mathematics classes.

May 1999: The first Paul Erdös Memorial Lecture is delivered by Ronald Graham. The title of Graham's talk was "Paul Erdös and his favorite problems in number theory," and it was presented at the fourth joint meeting of the AMS and the Mexican Mathematical Society at the University of North Texas on May 19, 1999. The Erdös Memorial Lecture is delivered every year by an outstanding mathematician and presented at an AMS sectional meeting. Funding for the lecture series is made possible by Andrew Beal, a Dallas banker with an interest in mathematics. Beal proposed a number theory conundrum that is now called the Beal Conjecture and he has pledged US$100,000 as a prize for its solution. The prize fund is held by the AMS, and Beal requested that income from the fund be used to support the Erdös Memorial Lectures. More information on the lecture series is available on the AMS web site.

May 1899 : The great historian of mathematics in antiquity, Otto Neugebauer, was born in Innsbruck Austria. An obituary that appeared in the journal Mathematical Astronomy (24 (1993) no. 4, 289-299) after his death at the age of 90 said: "It is no exaggeration to say that in our age the study of the early history of mathematical astronomy has largely been defined by the work of one scholar, Otto Neugebauer. He began as a mathematician, then turned to Egyptian mathematics, and after completing a comprehensive edition and analysis of Babylonian mathematics, took up the history of mathematical astronomy, to which he afterward devoted the greatest part of his attention. Through a productive career of sixty-five years, through three generations of colleagues and students, he has to a great extent created our understanding of mathematical astronomy from Babylon and Egypt, through Greco-Roman Antiquity, to India, Islam, and Europe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance." Neugebauer was the founder of the mathematical reviewing journal Zentralblatt für Mathematik. After emigrating from Germany to the United States during World War II, he founded Mathematical Reviews in 1940. An obituary about Neugebauer appeared in the May/June 1990 issue of the AMS Notices. Read more about him in the entry on the MacTutor History of Mathematics web page.

May 1923: Cathleen Synge Morawetz, the second woman to serve as President of the AMS, was born in Toronto, Canada. Her parents were both Irish and both trained in mathematics. Her father, John Lighton Synge, was on the faculty of the University of Toronto, and, after the family moved back to Ireland, he moved to Dublin University. Morawetz went to the Courant Institute at New York University as a doctoral student and finished her Ph.D. in 1951, under the direction of Kurt O. Friedrichs. She became part of the legendary group that, under the leadership of Richard Courant, made the Courant Institute the premier center for applied mathematics in the United States. She made fundamental contributions to partial differential equations related to shock waves and transonic flow. Her many honors include the National Medal of Science (1998) and the AMS Steele Prize (2003). Morawetz served as AMS President from 1995 to 1997. Read more about her in a Notices of the AMS article on the occasion of her receipt of the Steele Prize.

May 1988: Alexander Grothendieck, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century and a 1966 Fields Medalist, explained in the newspaper Le Monde his reasons for declining the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The prize, which carried a monetary award of US$270,000, was conferred on Grothendieck and his former collaborator, Pierre Deligne. Why did Grothendieck decline the prize? He explained in a May 4, 1988, letter to Le Monde that he did not need the money and that he had left the world of mathematics in 1970. He also wrote that "the only decisive proof of the fertility of ideas or of a new vision is that of time. Fertility is recognizable by offspring, not by honors."