November 8

Are You Sure ...

• ... that mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis (3 December 1616 – 8 November 1703) served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court?

File:Are You Sure (8 Nov 2020).png

Screenshot: Are You Sure (November 7, 2020)

On This Day in History and Fiction

• 

  1703: Mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis dies. He served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court.

• 

  1807: Engineer, hydrographer, and politician Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait dies. He designed and oversaw the building of ships, making structural improvements and developing techniques to improve the disposition of cargo in ships' holds.

• 

  1839: Birth of Ivan Goremykin heralds new age of Extreme Moustaches.

• 

  1848: Mathematician, logician, and philosopher Gottlob Frege born. Though will be largely ignored during his lifetime, his work will influence later generations of logicians and philosophers.

• 

  1895: While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the X-ray.

• 

  1969: Astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher dies. He performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies, providing the empirical basis for the expansion of the universe.

• 

  1974: Green Ring tells Dick Cavett a funny story about Learning to Protect Communications with Adversarial Neural Cryptography.

• 

  1976: Mathematician Pekka Myrberg dies. He did fundamental work on the iteration of rational functions (especially quadratic functions), developing the concept of period-doubling. Myrberg's research revived interest in the results of Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou.

• 

  2013: Physicist, mathematician, and activist William C. Davidon dies. He developed the first quasi-Newton algorithm, now known as the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell formula.