1859 lEdward Fitzgerald translates nearly 600 poems. Known as
the Rubaiyat,these poems are attributed to mathematician
OMAR KHAYYAM.1864 lSOFIA VASILYEVNA KOVALEVSKAYAteaches herself
trigonometry at the age of 14 in order to understand a
physics book written by her neighbor and given to her
family as a gift.1866 lSir Thomas Clifford Allbutt invents the first “short” medical
thermometer, taking the place of the device previously used,
which was a foot long and took 20 minutes to measure a
temperature.1873 lWilliam Shanks, owner of a British boarding school,
calculates the value of pi to 707 decimal places by hand. In
1944, with the aid of a calculator, it will be discovered that
Shanks made a mistake at the 526th entry.1876 lFRANÇOIS-EDOUARD-ANATOLE LUCASdiscovers that the
Mersenne number 2^172 – 1is a PRIME NUMBER, the largest
prime number ever calculated without the use of a
computer.1880 lM. Pépin solves the system of equations in integers,
x^2 +y^2 =z^2 ,x^2 =u^2 +v^2 ,x–y=u–v,given to Huygens
asa challenge from French mathematician Bernard
Frénicle de Bessy some 200 years earlier.1883 lLucas invents the mathematical puzzle called the Tower of
Hanoi, and publishes it under the name of Claus, which is an
anagram for Lucas.1886 lKovalevskaya wins the Prix Bordin from the French
Academy of Sciences for her paper on the rotation of a solid
body about a fixed point, which is so impressive that the
prize money is increased from 3,000 to 5,000 francs.1921 lAMELIE NOETHERpublishes her book, Idealtheorie in
Ringbereichen,which is credited as a major development in
the advancement of modern algebra.CHRONOLOGY 1859 – 1921
CHRONOLOGY 1859 – 1921