February 13

Are You Sure ...

• ... that polymath Roger Joseph Boscovich, in his 1745 book De viribus vivis ("On living forces"), tried to find a middle way between Isaac Newton's gravitational theory and Gottfried Leibniz's metaphysical theory of monad-points, and that Boscovich proposed "impenetrability" as a property of hard bodies, explaining their behavior in terms of force rather than matter?

• ... that Canopic Snickers is an unlicensed transdimensional corporation which manifests itself as an ancient Egyptian candy bar with alleged life extension properties?

• ... that actor, cryptographer, and alleged time-traveller Niles Cartouchian supposedly exists as multiple individuals in simultaneous entangled quantum states, and that these individual "brothers" can apparently communicate with each other despite living in different centuries?

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1787: Polymath Roger Joseph Boscovich dies. Boscovich was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, and Jesuit priest.

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  1805: Mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet born. Dirichlet will important make contributions to number theory, analysis, and mechanics. He will also be one of the first mathematicians to give the modern formal definition of a function.

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  1910: Physicist and inventor William Shockley born. He will share the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the point-contact transistor.

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  1926: Nuclear physicist Fay Ajzenberg-Selove born. She will do important experimental work in nuclear spectroscopy of light elements, authoring annual reviews of the energy levels of light atomic nuclei.

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  1956: Mathematician and philosopher Jan Łukasiewicz dies. Łukasiewicz' innovative thinking about the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle extended the bounds of traditional propositional logic.

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  1963: Discovery of Canopic Snickers an unlicensed transdimensional corporation which manifests itself as an ancient Egyptian candy bar with alleged life extension properties.

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  1992: Mathematician and physicist Nikolay Bogolyubov dies. His method of teaching, based on creation of a warm atmosphere, politeness, and kindness, is renowned in Russia as the "Bogolyubov approach".