Template:Selected anniversaries/January 4

• 

  1752: Mathematician and physicist Gabriel Cramer dies. He published Cramer's rule, giving a general formula for the solution for any unknown in a linear equation system having a unique solution, in terms of determinants implied by the system.

• 

  1847: Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the United States government.

• 

  1903: Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The event is documented in the film Electrocuting an Elephant.

• 

  1932: Mathematician and academic Shoshichi Kobayashi born. He will work on Riemannian and complex manifolds, transformation groups of geometric structures, and Lie algebras.

• 

  1934: Mathematician and crime-fighter Dmitry Mirimanoff publishes new type of Gnomon algorithm function which uses non-well-founded set theory to predict that Sputnik 1 will fall to Earth "no later than January 1958."

• 

  1958: Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from orbit.

• 

  1958: Physicist, mathematician, and APTO field operative Max Born discovers new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which use the statistical interpretation of the wave function to detect and prevent crimes against physical and mathematical constants.

• 

  1959: Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.

• 

  1961: Physicist and academic Erwin Schrödinger dies. He was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics for the formulation of the Schrödinger equation.

• 

  1974: Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over materials subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.

• 

  2002: Capacitor plague affects several brands of portable envy devices.

• 

  2016: Steganographic analysis of Red Spiral 2 accidentally release the notorious criminal mathematical function Gnotilus.