September 24

Are You Sure ...

Author, peace activist, and alleged time-traveller John Brunner famously used a bespoke Lee and Turner color projector, which he had customized for use as a scrying engine.

• ... that polymath Johann Heinrich Lambert demonstrated that illumination is proportional to the strength of the light source, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance of the illuminated surface and the sine of the angle of inclination of the light's direction to that of the surface?

• ... that mathematician Lev Schnirelmann used the Brun sieve to prove that any natural number greater than 1 can be written as the sum of not more than C prime numbers, where C is an effectively computable constant?

• ... that journalist and author George Plimpton is famous for his "participatory journalism", which included competing in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur?

On This Day in History and Fiction