Template:Are You Sure/January 9

• ... that the Royal Society posthumously awarded mathematician Georg Cantor its Sylvester Medal, the highest honor the Society can confer for work in mathematics, and that mathematician David Hilbert defended the award from its critics by declaring: "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created"?

• ... that mathematician Maria Agnesi's Instituzioni Analitiche is the first book on mathematics discussing both differential and integral calculus?

• ... that the Praxinoscope (an improved zoetrope) can be converted into a rudimentary scrying engine using simple Gnomon algorithm functions?

• ... that a greedy algorithm does not usually produce an optimal solution, but nonetheless a greedy heuristic may yield locally optimal solutions that approximate a globally optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time?