On this day in 1558 Queen Elizabeth I became the Queen of England. Constantly in danger of assassination throughout her life, it looks as though (given her picture above), that she was not the happiest camper in the campground.  This was, no doubt, partially due to her father, King Henry VIII, who disowned her and had her mother, Anne Boleyn, beheaded after trumped up charges and a guilty conviction against her were obtained by torturing her family and friends.  She was 25 years when she became the Queen, and she reigned for 45 long (and generally peace-filled and prosperous) years.  Elizabeth 1 re-established Protestantism as the national faith of England and made everyone go to the Church of England on Sunday and use the same prayer book (what they did on their own time was of no concern to her).  She is remembered as having said the following:

“The past cannot be cured”

“They are most deceived that trusteth most in themselves.”

“There is small disproportion betwixt a fool who useth not wit because he hath it not and him that useth it not when it should avail him.”

and also:

“I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.” (She would end up being neither.)

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Jean le Rond d’Alembert, a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher was born on this date in 1717.  In his lifetime he:

• theoretically explained refraction.
• wrote about what is now called D’Alembert’s paradox: that the drag on a body immersed in an inviscid, incompressible fluid is zero.
• co-developed the fundamental theorem of algebra, which is known as the d’Alembert/Gauss theorem.
• created his ratio test, a test to see if a series converges.
• discovered the D’Alembertian operator, which first arose from his analysis of vibrating strings, and which plays an important role in modern theoretical physics.   (And if you have any idea what any of these things mean, then you are a better mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher than I am).

But one thing d’Alembert got wrong had to do with probability.  He argued that the probability of a coin landing heads increased for every time that it came up tails.  This led some in the gambling enterprise to develop a strategy of decreasing one’s bet the more one wins and increasing one’s bet the more one loses (this is called the D’Alembert system and has caused more than one unfortunate person to lose his money, his shirt, and his home).

Even so, it looks like he was a happy man given his portrait above.

(Btw, this one was posted for you Mr. Math, otherwise known as Jim Jannotti.)

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But perhaps the award for happiest person associated with today’s date should go to the comedian, singer, and all around funny guy, Archie Campbell.  Campbell, you may recall, was a writer and star of Hee Haw, a popular long-running country-flavored television variety show. He made me laugh so hard at times when I was a child, that the milk, soda, or other beverage I was drinking at the time would come out my nose.