Today in Science History!
Scientist born on March 16
R. Walter Cunningham
Thumbnail – R. Walter Cunningham
Born 16 Mar 1932
Ronnie Walter Cunningham is an American astronaut and civilian participant in the Apollo 7 mission , in which the first manned flight of Apollo Command and Service modules was made. On 11 Oct 1968, he occupied the lunar module pilot seat for the eleven-day flight of Apollo 7. With Walter M. Schirra, Jr., and Donn F. Eisele, he participated in maneuvers enabling the crew to perform exercises in transposition and docking and lunar orbit rendezvous with the S-IVB stage of their Saturn IB launch vehicle; in test ignitions of the service module propulsion engine; in measuring the accuracy of performance of all spacecraft systems; and provided the first effective television transmission of onboard crew activities.
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov
Born 16 Mar 1927; died 24 Apr 1967 at age 40.
Soviet cosmonaut who was the first man known to have died during a space mission. He flew on two space missions. He was Command Pilot of Voskhod I, on a day-long mission, 12–13 Oct 1964. Also on board were Dr. Yegorov, a medical doctor as flight physiologist; and the spacecraft engineer Konstantin Feoktistov. For this landing, the spacecraft’s parachutes opened at an altitude of 7 km followed by a soft-landing system that used streams of gases from nozzles to reduce touchdown velocity to near zero. Komarov died during the landing after his second space mission, when he was Commander of Soyuz-I, 23–24 Apr 1967, on a nearly 27 hour flight. On its return, his spacecraft became entangled in its main parachute and fell several miles to Earth.
Frederick Reines
Born 16 Mar 1918; died 26 Aug 1998 at age 80.
American physicist who was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for his detection in 1956 of neutrinos, working with his colleague Clyde L. Cowan, Jr. The neutrino is a subatomic particle, a tiny lepton with little or no mass and a neutral charge which had been postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in the early 1930s but had previously remained undiscovered. (Reines shared the Nobel Prize with physicist Martin Lewis Perl, who discovered the tau lepton.)
Kunihiko Kodaira
Born 16 Mar 1915; died 26 Jul 1997 at age 82.
Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954 for his work in algebraic geometry and complex analysis. Kodaira’s work includes applications of Hilbert space methods to differential equations which was an important topic in his early work and was largely the result of influence by Weyl. Through the influence of Hodge, he also worked on harmonic integrals and later he applied this work to problem in algebraic geometry. Another important area of Kodaira’s work was to apply sheaves to algebraic geometry. In around 1960 he became involved in the classification of compact, complex analytic spaces. One of the themes running through much of his work is the Riemann-Roch theorem. He won the 1985 Wolf Prize.
François-Emile Matthes
Born 16 Mar 1874; died 21 Jun 1948 at age 74.
Dutch-born American geologist and topographer whose mapping, with marvelous draftsmanship, of some of the most rugged and scenic features of the western United States was instrumental in the establishment of several notable national parks. He came to the U.S.A. in 1891, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked with the US Geological Survey (1896–1947). An authority on glaciers and glaciation, he was chairman of the committee on glaciers of the American Geophysical Union (1932–46), and developed an international glacier study program. During both world wars, he engaged in military geology.[Image: Plane station table at Cape Royal in 1904]
Heinrich Kayser
Born 16 Mar 1853; died 14 Oct 1940 at age 87.
Heinrich (Gustav Johannes) Kayser was a German physicist who discovered the presence of helium in the Earth’s atmosphere. Prior to that scientists had detected helium only in the sun and in some minerals. Kayser’s early research work was on the properties of sound. In collaboration with the physicist and mathematician Carl D.T. Runge, Kayser carefully mapped the spectra of a large number of elements. He wrote a handbook of spectroscopy (1901 – 12) and a treatise on the electron theory (1905).[Image: Helium spectrum]
Martinus Willem Beijerinck
Born 16 Mar 1851; died 1 Jan 1931 at age 79.
Dutch botanist who was one of the first microbiologists to recognize the importance of lactic acid bacteria for food production. He contributed to agriculture, botany, microbiology, chemistry and genetics. In research on gall wasps and the formation of galls (1882) he laid groundwork for the theory of ontogeny in higher plants and animals whereby growth enzymes act in series in a fixed order (1917). Since his father was a tobacco dealer who went bankrupt, he researched the tobacco mosaic virus, which causes a disease of tobacco plants with serious economic impact. He discovered that even after filtering the sap of an infected plant to remove bacteria, the liquid was still able to carry infection to another plant. Thus he knew the disease was not due to bacteria, but by something else in the the liquid, which he called a filterable virus (from Latin word for poison) but which later researchers demonstrated in fact had a particle form.
Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler
Born 16 Mar 1846; died 7 Jul 1927 at age 81.
Swedish mathematician who founded the international mathematical journal Acta Mathematica and whose contributions to mathematical research helped advance the Scandinavian school of mathematics. Mittag-Leffler made numerous contributions to mathematical analysis (concerned with limits and including calculus, analytic geometry and probability theory). He worked on the general theory of functions, concerning relationships between independent and dependent variables. His best known work concerned the analytic representation of a one-valued function, this work culminated in the Mittag-Leffler theorem.
Andrew Smith Hallidie
Born 16 Mar 1836; died 24 Apr 1900 at age 64.
English-American engineer and inventor who built the cable car system first used on the steep hills of San Francisco streets (1 Aug 1873). Streetcars on rails were fitted with a mechanical device that gripped an underground endless moving cable to travel and released to stop. The cable passed around pulleys and was driven by a large wheel at an engine house. He had learned the business of making wire rope from his father before moving to the U.S. (1853), where he designed and built wire suspension bridges and flumes. He began manufacturing wire rope in 1857. Hallidie also developed a method of moving freight over canyons using an endless wire rope, and inventions for the transmission of power with wire rope, which seeded his idea for cable cars.
Eduard Heine
Born 16 Mar 1821; died 21 Oct 1881 at age 60.
Heinrich Eduard Heine was a German mathematician whose published work includes contributions on partial differential equations, the theory of heat, summation of series, continued fractions and elliptic functions. Heine also worked on Legendre polynomials, Lamé functions and Bessel functions. He remains known for the Heine-Borel theorem, which can be given in a simplified form as “a subset of the reals is compact if and only if it is closed and bounded.” Heine also formulated the concept of uniform continuity.
Anna Atkins
Born 16 Mar 1799; died 9 Jun 1871 at age 72.
English botanist and photographer who is recognized as the first female photographer. She learned the calograph technique directly from William Fox Talbot, a family friend. Another family friend, Sir John Herschel, taught her the cyanotype photogram contact printing method he had invented. She had developed an interest in biological subjects from her father, John George Children, and illustrated his book, a translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells. Atkins combined these talents to become the first person to publish a book with photographs, and eventually produced three volumes of her own cyanotypes of seaweed in Photographs of British Algae, privately publishing the first volume in Oct 1843.
Ami Boué
Born 16 Mar 1794; died 21 Nov 1881 at age 87.
Austrian geological pioneer who fostered international cooperation in geological research. While studying medicine in Edinburgh, he was influenced by the noted Scottish geologist Robert Jameson and studied the volcanic rocks in various parts of Scotland and the Hebrides. After he received his M.D. (1817) Boué continued his medical studies in Europe, but ultimately decided to devote himself to geology. He settled in Paris in 1830 and was a founder of the Société Géologique de France. For the next four years he published reports on geological progress in other countries. In 1845 he finished his comprehensive overview of geology, Essai de carte géologique du globe terrestre (“Essay on a Geological Map of the World”).
Georg Simon Ohm
Died 6 Jul 1854 at age 65 (born 16 Mar 1789).
German physicist who showed by experiment (1825) that there are no “perfect” electrical conductors. All conductors have some resistance. He stated the famous Ohm’s law (1826), now written as: “If the given temperature remains constant, the current flowing through certain conductors is proportional to the potential difference (voltage) across it.” or V=iR.
