Template:Selected anniversaries/August 17: Difference between revisions
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File:Didacus automaton profile.jpg|link=Didacus automaton (nonfiction)|1562: [[Didacus automaton (nonfiction)|Didacus automaton]] develops self-awareness, invents new type of [[scrying engine]]. | |File:Didacus automaton profile.jpg|link=Didacus automaton (nonfiction)|1562: [[Didacus automaton (nonfiction)|Didacus automaton]] develops self-awareness, invents new type of [[scrying engine]]. | ||
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||1585: A first group of colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh under the charge of Ralph Lane lands in the New World to create Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina. | |||
||1607: Pierre de Fermat born ... lawyer and mathematician. Pic. *** INCORRECT DOB? *** | |||
||1673: Regnier de Graaf dies ... physician and anatomist. Pic. | |||
File:Robert Fulton.jpg|link=Robert Fulton (nonfiction)|1807: [[Robert Fulton (nonfiction)|Robert Fulton]]'s North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world. | |||
||1807: Johannes Nikolaus Tetens dies ... natural philosopher whose empirical approach strongly influenced the work of Immanuel Kant, and later in his life, Tetens became interested in mathematics, especially in actuarial applications. From 1760, as a teacher of natural philosophy he wrote on diverse topics but later began the development of the field of developmental psychology in Germany. He wrote Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung (1777) on the origin and structure of knowledge. He changed career after 1789 to the civil service during which time he pursued mathematics. As a statistician he produced an Introduction to the Calculation of Life Annuities (1785) and On the Tetens Mortality Curve (1785). Pic. | |||
||1809: Matthew Boulton FRS dies ... manufacturer and business partner of Scottish engineer James Watt. In the final quarter of the 18th century, the partnership installed hundreds of Boulton & Watt steam engines, which were a great advance on the state of the art, making possible the mechanisation of factories and mills. Boulton applied modern techniques to the minting of coins, striking millions of pieces for Britain and other countries, and supplying the Royal Mint with up-to-date equipment. Pic. | |||
||1828: Jules Bernard Luys born ... neurologist and physician. | |||
||1835: The wrench was patented by Solymon Merrick of Springfield, Massachusetts. | |||
||1862: American Indian Wars: The Dakota War of 1862 begins in Minnesota as Lakota warriors attack white settlements along the Minnesota River. | |||
||1877: Asaph Hall discovered the second of two moons Mars that he sighted this month. He named this second moon Phobos. Five days earlier, on 12 Aug 1877, Hall had observed the first moon, which he named Deimos. | |||
||1880: Paul Kammerer born ... biologist, he claimed to have produced experimental evidence that acquired traits could be inherited. Almost all of Kammerer's experiments involved forcing various amphibians to breed in environments that were radically different from their native habitat to demonstrate Lamarkian inheritance. (This is the idea that what one acquires during one's lifetime is passed on to that person's offspring. If you play guitar, your children will have nimble fingers. Each generation builds upon the past and continues to improve.) When later accused of faking exceptional results with the midwife toad, during a time of depression, he shot himself. Pic. | |||
||1886: Alexander Mikhaylovich Butlerov dies ... chemist, one of the principal creators of the theory of chemical structure (1857–1861), the first to incorporate double bonds into structural formulas, the discoverer of hexamine (1859), the discoverer of formaldehyde (1859) and the discoverer of the formose reaction (1861). He first proposed the idea of possible tetrahedral arrangement of valence bonds in carbon compounds in 1862. Pic. | |||
||1891: The automobile electric self-starter was patented. | |||
||1893: Walter Noddack born ... chemist who discovered the element rhenium (Jun 1925) in collaboration with his wife Ida Tacke. In 1922, he began a long search for undiscovered elements. After three years, the careful fractionation of certain ores yielded element 75, a rare heavy metallic element that resembles manganese. Named rhenium after the Rhine River, it was the last stable element to be discovered. Noddack is also remembered for arguing for a concept he called allgegenwartskonzentration or, literally, omnipresent concentration. This idea, reminiscent of Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, assumed that every mineral actually contained every element. The reason they could not all be detected was they existed in too small quantities. Pic: https://sciencenotes.org/today-in-science-history-december-7-walter-noddack/ | |||
||1896: Leslie Groves born ... general and engineer. | |||
||1899: Julius Bartels born ... geophysicist and statistician who made notable contributions to the physics of the Sun and Moon; to geomagnetism and meteorology; and to the physics of the ionosphere. He also made fundamental contributions to statistical methods for geophysics. Pic search. | |||
||1900: August Becker born ... mid-ranking functionary in the SS of Nazi Germany and chemist in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). He helped design the vans with a gas chamber built into the back compartment used in early Nazi mass murder of disabled people, political dissidents, Jews, and other "racial enemies," including Action T4 as well as the Einsatzgruppen (mobile Nazi death squads) in the Nazi-occupied portions of the Soviet Union. No pic online. | |||
||1901: Francis Perrin born ... physicist - Nuclear High-Commissioner - In 1972, he discovered the Oklo natural reactor. Pic. | |||
||1904: Cornelis Simon Meijer born ... mathematician at the university of Groningen who introduced the Meijer G-function, a very general function that includes most of the elementary and higher mathematical functions as special cases; he also introduced generalizations of the Laplace transform that are referred to as Meijer transforms. Pic: http://www.cs.rug.nl/jbi/History/Meijer | |||
||1906: Hazel Bishop born ... chemist and cosmetic executive who made an indelible mark on the cosmetics industry by inventing non-smear ("stays on you not on him") kissproof lipstick. During WW II, as senior organic chemist with Standard Oil, she discovered the cause of deposits affecting superchargers of aircraft engines. She never married. In 1949, after a long series of home experiments, in a kitchen fitted out as a laboratory, she perfected a lipstick that stayed on the lips longer than any other product then available, and began its manufacture. It was introduced at $1 a tube in the summer of the following year. In 1951, a partner forced her out of the $10 million company she created. Pic. | |||
||1908: ''Fantasmagorie'', the first animated cartoon, created by Émile Cohl, is shown in Paris, France. | |||
||1911: Mikhail Botvinnik born ... chess player and engineer (d. 1995) - computer chess | |||
||1918: Bolshevik revolutionary leader Moisei Uritsky is assassinated. | |||
||1922: Rudolf Haag born ... physicist. He was best known for his contributions to the algebraic formulation of axiomatic quantum field theory (QFT), namely the Haag–Kastler axioms, and a central no-go theorem in QFT, Haag's theorem, which demonstrates the nonexistence of a unitary time-evolution operator in the interaction picture. Pic. | |||
||1924: Pavel Samuilovich Urysohn dies ... mathematician of Jewish origin who is best known for his contributions in dimension theory, and for developing Urysohn's Metrization Theorem and Urysohn's Lemma. Pic. | |||
||1924: Norwood Russell Hanson born - philosopher of science. Hanson was a pioneer in advancing the argument that observation is theory-laden — that observation language and theory language are deeply interwoven — and that historical and contemporary comprehension are similarly deeply interwoven. His single most central intellectual concern was the comprehension and development of a logic of discovery. Pic. | |||
File:Erik Ivar Fredholm.jpg|link=Erik Ivar Fredholm (nonfiction)|1927: Mathematician [[Erik Ivar Fredholm (nonfiction)|Erik Ivar Fredholm]] dies. He introduced and analyzed a class of integral equations now called Fredholm equations. Fredholm's work on integral equations and operator theory anticipated the theory of Hilbert spaces. | |||
File:Gary_Powers.jpg|link=Francis Gary Powers (nonfiction)|1929: Captain and pilot [[Francis Gary Powers (nonfiction)|Francis Gary Powers]] born. | |||
||1930: Bruce H. Mahan born ... physical chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley known for his work in the fundamentals of chemical reactions and devotion to chemistry education. | |||
||1942: Jerrold Eldon Marsden born ... mathematician. H was one of the world leading authorities in mathematical and theoretical classical mechanics. Marsden laid much of the foundation for symplectic topology. Pic. | |||
||1943: World War II: The Royal Air Force begins Operation Hydra, the first air raid of the Operation Crossbow strategic bombing campaign against Germany's V-weapon program. | |||
||1945: The novella ''Animal Farm'' by George Orwell is first published. | |||
||1953: The first meeting of Narcotics Anonymous takes place, in Southern California. | |||
||1958: Pioneer 0, America's first attempt at lunar orbit, is launched using the first Thor-Able rocket and fails. Notable as one of the first attempted launches beyond Earth orbit by any country. | |||
||1958: John Marshall dies ... archaeologist who was director general of the Indian Archaeological Survey (1902-31). His aim was to bring to life Indian culture in the past by uncovering all possible details of her cities, tools, ornaments, laws and customs. In the 1920's, Marshall he began a systematic program of excavations that revealed Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, the two largest cities of the previously unknown Indus Valley Civilization, which he firmly believed was comparable in every way with the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. He excavated Taxila, Vaisali, Nalanda, Rajagriha and Sarnath; enacted the Ancient Monuments Act (1904), built up a library, reorganised publications and recruited Indians to high positions in the Survey. Pic. | |||
||1966: Captain Henry Joseph Round dies ... engineer, one of the early pioneers of radio, and personal assistant to Guglielmo Marconi. He was the first to report observation of electroluminescence from a solid state diode. Pic. | |||
||1969: Otto Stern dies ... scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1943 for his development of the molecular beam as a tool for studying the characteristics of molecules and for his measurement of the magnetic moment of the proton. Pic. | |||
|File:Skip Digits.jpg|link=Skip Digits|1969: During a command performance at the White House, musician and alleged math criminal [[Skip Digits]] gives the first public demonstration of the [[math virus]] which will later be known as the [[Watergate Scandal (virus)|Watergate Scandal virus]]. | |||
File:Venera 7.jpg|link=Venera 7 (nonfiction)|1970: Soviet spacecraft [[Venera 7 (nonfiction)|Venera 7]] launched from Earth. It will become the first successful soft landing on another planet (Venus). | File:Venera 7.jpg|link=Venera 7 (nonfiction)|1970: Soviet spacecraft [[Venera 7 (nonfiction)|Venera 7]] launched from Earth. It will become the first successful soft landing on another planet (Venus). | ||
||1974: Cypra Cecilia Krieger-Dunaij dies ... mathematician ... well known for having translated two works of Wacław Sierpiński in general topology. Pic. | |||
||1977: The Soviet icebreaker Arktika becomes the first surface ship to reach the North Pole. | |||
||1978: The first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by balloon was completed when three Americans, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, landed their Double Eagle II in France. Their 3,100-mile flight began on 11 Aug 1978 from Presque Isle, Maine and ended 137-hr 6-min later. The helium balloon Double Eagle II was 112- ft high, 65-ft diam., capacity 160,000 cu.ft. with a 15x7x4½-ft passenger gondola named The Spirit of Albuquerque. The underside of the gondola was a twin-hulled catamaran to provide emergency flotation for any unplanned water landing. Double Eagle II was built by Ed Yost. The history of transatlantic balloon crossing included seventeen prior unsuccessful attempts and seven lives lost. | |||
||1987: Harold R. McCluskey dies ... a chemical operations technician at the Hanford Plutonium Finishing Plant located in Washington State who is known for having survived, on August 30, 1976, exposure to the highest dose of radiation from americium ever recorded. He became known as the 'Atomic Man'. Pic: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/four-decades-later-workers-enter-site-of-atomic-man-accident/ | |||
||1993: Feng Kang dies ... mathematician. Pic search. | |||
||2000: Robert Rowe Gilruth dies ... aerospace scientist, engineer, and a pioneer of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. He developed the X-1, first plane to break the sound barrier. Gilruth directed Project Mercury, the initial program for achieving manned space flight. Under his leadership, the first American astronaut orbited the Earth only a little over 3 years after NASA was created. In 1961, President Kennedy and the Congress committed the nation to a manned lunar landing within the decade. Gilruth was named the Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center and assigned the responsibility of designing and developing the spacecraft and associated equipment, planning and controlling missions, and training flight crews. He retired from NASA in 1973. Pic. | |||
||2004: Shizuo Kakutani dies ... mathematician, best known for his eponymous fixed-point theorem. Pic. | |||
||2005: John N. Bahcall dies ... astrophysicist and academic ... best known for his contributions to the solar neutrino problem, the development of the Hubble Space Telescope and for his leadership and development of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. | |||
||2007: Victor L. Klee, Jr. dies ... mathematician specialising in convex sets, functional analysis, analysis of algorithms, optimization, and combinatorics. Pic. | |||
||2008: Andrew Mattei Gleason dies ... mathematician who as a young World War II naval officer broke German and Japanese military codes, then over the succeeding sixty years made fundamental contributions to widely varied areas of mathematics, including the solution of Hilbert's fifth problem, and was a leader in reform and innovation in mathematics teaching at all levels. Pic. | |||
||2011: William K. Estes dies ... psychologist who was a leader in bringing mathematical methods into psychological research. In 1977, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for “his fundamental theories of cognition and learning that transformed the field of experimental psychology. His pioneering methods of quantitative modeling and an insistence on rigor and precision established the standard for modern psychological science.” In his early professional research he partnered with another pioneering psychologist B. F. Skinner in studying animal learning and behavior. The quantitative method they devised to measure emotional reactions is still widely used today. From 1979, Estes focused on investigating human memory and classification learning. Pics: https://www.todayinsci.com/8/8_17.htm https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/11/william-kaye-estes/ | |||
||2016: Katharine Blodgett Gebbie dies ... astrophysicist and civil servant. Pic. | |||
File:GW170817_spectrograms.png|link=GW170817 (nonfiction)|2017: The [[GW170817 (nonfiction)|GW170817 gravitational wave signal]] is observed by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. It is the first gravitational wave event observed to have a simultaneous electromagnetic signal, a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy. | |||
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Latest revision as of 13:09, 7 February 2022
1807: Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
1927: Mathematician Erik Ivar Fredholm dies. He introduced and analyzed a class of integral equations now called Fredholm equations. Fredholm's work on integral equations and operator theory anticipated the theory of Hilbert spaces.
1929: Captain and pilot Francis Gary Powers born.
1970: Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 launched from Earth. It will become the first successful soft landing on another planet (Venus).
2017: The GW170817 gravitational wave signal is observed by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. It is the first gravitational wave event observed to have a simultaneous electromagnetic signal, a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy.