Danilo Blanuša facts for kids
Danilo Blanuša (born December 7, 1903 – died August 8, 1987) was a smart Croatian person who was a mathematician, physicist, and engineer. He also worked as a professor at the University of Zagreb.
About His Life
Danilo Blanuša was born in a city called Osijek, which was part of Austria-Hungary back then, but is now in Croatia. He went to elementary school in Vienna and Steyr in Austria. Later, he attended a type of high school called a gymnasium in Osijek and Zagreb.
He studied engineering in both Zagreb and Vienna. He also learned a lot about mathematics and physics. His career began in Zagreb, where he started working and teaching. One of his students, Mileva Prvanović, earned her special degree (doctorate) in geometry in 1955. This was the first time someone got such a degree in geometry in Serbia.
Blanuša became the dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Zagreb for the 1957–58 school year. This means he was in charge of that part of the university. In 1960, he received the Ruđer Bošković prize, which is a special award. He passed away in Zagreb.
His Work in Mathematics
In mathematics, Danilo Blanuša became famous for finding two special kinds of graphs called "snarks" in 1946. A "snark" is a specific type of graph that is hard to color in a certain way. The very first snark was the Petersen graph. Blanuša's discovery helped start a whole new area of study in graph theory.
The idea of snarks actually came from P. G. Tait in the 1880s. He showed that a famous problem called the four color theorem was connected to whether a snark could be drawn flat without lines crossing (planar). Later, in 1976, an American mathematician named Martin Gardner gave them the name "snarks." He named them after a mysterious creature from Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark.
Blanuša also did important work on how to "fit" complex shapes into simpler spaces. He showed how a curved 2D space (like a saddle shape) could be placed into a 6D flat space. He also found ways to fit other complex shapes into even higher-dimensional flat spaces. He also studied special mathematical functions, like Bessel functions. Some of his findings are even included in a Japanese math encyclopedia called Sugaku jiten.
His Work in Physics
Most of Blanuša's work in physics was about the theory of relativity. He found a mistake in some important equations about heat and temperature in relativity. These equations were first published by Max Planck in 1908.
Planck's equations said:
- Q (heat) = Q0 (original heat) multiplied by 'a'
- T (temperature) = T0 (original temperature) multiplied by 'a'
(where 'a' is a special factor related to speed)
Blanuša showed that it should actually be:
- Q = Q0 divided by 'a'
- T = T0 divided by 'a'
He published this correction in 1947 in a journal called Glasnik. Even though he found it first, this correction was later rediscovered and often wrongly credited to someone else in science books.
See also
- Blanuša snarks
Images for kids
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A robot, representing the fields of engineering and physics.
