Template:Selected anniversaries/November 20
1820: An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. Stranded thousands of miles from the coast of South America with little food and water, the 20-man crew was forced to make for land in the ship's surviving whaleboats; eight men survived the ordeal.
1889: Astronomer and cosmologist Edwin Hubble born. He will discover the fact that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way.
1908: Mathematician Georgy Voronoy (Voronoi) dies. He invented what are today called Voronoi diagrams or Voronoi tessellations, which partition a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects.
1924: Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot born. He will be one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set in 1980.
1934: Mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Willem de Sitter dies. He co-authored a paper with Albert Einstein in 1932 in which they discuss the implications of cosmological data for the curvature of the universe.
1980: Lake Peigneur drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole.
1980: Voyager 1 flies by Saturn, completing its primary mission.
2019: Recent survey shows that Fantasy Voronoi diagram is more popular than Fantasy American Football.