Posted on December 22, 2018
If you're Russian, and a mathematician, and you were born on December 22 in the mid- to late-1800s - well, you were bound to make it to Wikipedia-level fame!
At least, that is to say that three different Russian mathematicians from that half-century were born on this date - and became famous enough to get Wikipedia articles!
On December 22, 1853, Evgraf Fedorov was born. He ended up making big contributions in the study of polytopes and tessellations, and he also worked with crystals and minerals.
Poly-whats? Tessel-whosits?
Have you ever heard that a polygon is a 2-dimensional closed shape made of only straight sides?
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| Above, examples of polygons. Below, 2-D shapes that are NOT polygons |
And a polyhedron is a 3-dimensional shape with only flat sides?
Well, a polytope includes polygons and polyhedrons but also includes shapes with only flat sides that have 4 or 5 or ANY number of dimensions! And, no, I cannot easily draw a 4-D or 5-D polytope! But check out these items that have been created to help us understand multi-dimensional polytopes:
A tessellation is a way of tiling a plane using one, two, or more geometric shapes so that there are no overlaps and no gaps.
There are so so so many possible tessellations. Federov, of course, worked with straight-sided shapes like these:
To celebrate Federov, make some paper models of polyhedra or design your own tessellation!
On December 22, 1869, Dmitri Egorov was born. His specialty was differential geometry. Also, he served as President of the Moscow Mathematical Society, and he edited their journal.
Differ-what-ial?
Differential geometry is a sort of high-level math that is not incredibly easy to explain, but I will say that it is used in getting images of the insides of our bodies for doctors, and it's used for computer graphics, and it's used for building robots, and probably lots more...
On December 22, 1898, Vladimir Fock was born. His mathematical work was in the field of quantum physics.
Aaaannnnddd... quantum physics (aka quantum mechanics) is so hard to understand that one of the most brilliant scientists ever, Richard Feynman, who helped invent quantum mechanics, said:
Still, quantum physics is super fun to TRY to understand. Check out this video.
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