October 3

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  1842: Mathematician Arthur Cayley admitted to fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, at age 21, younger than any other fellow at the College.

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  1881: Mathematician and religious leader Orson Pratt dies. As part of his system of Mormon theology, Pratt embraced the philosophical doctrine of hylozoism.

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  1882: Canterbury scrying engine reprogrammed to detect and expose crimes against mathematical constants.

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  1891: Mathematician Édouard Lucas dies. He studied the Fibonacci sequence; the related Lucas sequences and Lucas numbers are named after him.

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  1930: Mathematician Robin Farquharson born. He will write an influential analysis of voting systems in his doctoral thesis, later published as Theory of Voting.

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  2006: Mathematician and physicist John Crank dies. He worked on the numerical solution of partial differential equations; his work with Phyllis Nicolson on the heat equation resulted in the Crank–Nicolson method.

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  2012: Physicist and astrophysicist Robert F. Christy dies. He is generally credited with the insight that a solid sub-critical mass of plutonium could be explosively compressed into supercriticality, a great simplification of earlier concepts of implosion requiring hollow shells.