Are You Sure (October 9)

CIA officer Left: E. Howard Hunt. Right: "Three tramps" arrested after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

• ... that American intelligence officer and writer E. Howard Hunt (9 October 1918 – 23 January 2007) was a CIA officer from 1949 to 1970; and that Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy and others, plotted burglaries and other illegal undercover operations for the Nixon administration? Are You Sure ...

• ... that mathematician and astronomer David Gregory David Gregory (nonfiction) became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1705; and that at the Union of 1707, Gregory was given the responsibility of re-organizing the Scottish Mint?

• ... that mathematician, scholar, and poet Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac (9 October 1581 – 26 February 1638) wrote a translation, from Greek to Latin, of the Arithmetica of Diophantus; and that it was this very translation in which Pierre de Fermat wrote his famous margin note claiming that he had a proof of Fermat's last theorem; and that the same text renders Diophantus' term παρισὀτης as adaequalitat, which became Fermat's technique of adequality, a pioneering method of infinitesimal calculus?

• ... that French Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus (9 October 1859 – 12 July 1935) was falsely accused of treason, brought to trial, and convicted in 1884; that his enemies were motivated by anti-Semitism; that his trial became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French history, with a wide echo throughout Europe; and that Dreyfus was completely exonerated?

—October 9, 2020

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