January 5

• 

  1625: Astronomer Simon Marius dies. He discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, independently of Galileo Galilei.

• 

  1723: Astronomer and mathematician Nicole-Reine Lepaute born. She will predict the return of Halley's Comet, calculate the timing of a solar eclipse, and construct a group of catalogs for the stars.

• 

  1895: French army officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island.

• 

  1932: Novelist, literary critic, and philosopher Umberto Eco born. He will cite James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who will have influenced his work the most.

• 

  1945: Mathematician Dmitry Mirimanoff dies. In 1917, he introduced (though not as explicitly as John von Neumann later) the cumulative hierarchy of sets and the notion of von Neumann ordinals; although he introduced a notion of regular (and well-founded set) he did not consider regularity as an axiom, but also explored what is now called non-well-founded set theory, and had an emergent idea of what is now called bisimulation.

• 

  1970: Physicist and mathematician Max Born dies. He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".

• 

  1983: Premiere of ScarNFTs, a crime NFT film about Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino), who arrives penniless in 1980s Miami and goes on to sell non-fungible tokens to a powerful drug lord.

• 

  2001: Nuclear physicist Arnold Flammersfeld dies. Flammersfeld worked on the German nuclear energy project during World War II.