October 7

Are You Sure ... (October 7, 2020)

Asteroid 2008 TC3: Estimated path and altitude of the meteor in red, with the possible location for the METEOSAT IR fireball (bolide) as orange crosshairs and the infrasound detection of the explosion in green.

• ... that 2008 TC3 was an asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere on October 7, 2008; that it exploded at an estimated 37 kilometers (23 mi) above the Nubian Desert in Sudan; that some 600 meteorites, weighing a total of 10.5 kilograms (23.1 lb), were recovered, some containing nanodiamonds; and that it was the first time that an asteroid impact had been predicted before its entry into the atmosphere as a meteor?

• ... that the Tunguska Event Preservation Society offered a tour of the 2008 TC3 meteor fall as a benefit to new members during its 2020 membership drive?

• ... that a derangement is a permutation of the elements of a set such that no element appears in its original position; and that the principle of derangement was first considered by mathematician Pierre Raymond de Montmort in 1708, and that he solved it in 1713, as did Nicholas Bernoulli at about the same time?

• ... that mathematician Olga Taussky-Todd (30 August 1906 — 7 October 1995) was hired by a group of German mathematicians to find and correct the many mathematical errors in the works of David Hilbert, so that they could be collected into a volume to be presented to Hilbert on his birthday, and that there was only one paper (on the continuum hypothesis) which Taussky-Todd was unable to repair?

Screenshot: Are You Sure (October 7, 2020)

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1719: Mathematician Pierre Raymond de Montmort dies. He wrote Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard, an influential book about probability and games of chance which introduced the combinatorial study of derangements.

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  1796: Mathematician and philosopher Thomas Reid dies. Reid believed that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry, justifying our belief that there is an external world.

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  1885: Physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr born. He will make foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he will receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.

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  1919: Computer scientist and academic Henriette Avram born. She will develope the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) format, the international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries.

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  1995: Mathematician and academic Olga Taussky-Todd dies. She contributed to matrix theory (in particular the computational stability of complex matrices), algebraic number theory, group theory, and numerical analysis.

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  2008: Asteroid 2008 TC3 entered Earth's atmosphere and exploded at an estimated 37 kilometers (23 mi) above the Nubian Desert in Sudan. It was the first time that an asteroid impact had been predicted before its entry into the atmosphere as a meteor.

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  2017: The Worcester Lunch Car Company's Research Division demonstrates advanced Flying Diner technology, including a new dinner menu.