April 19

Are You Sure ... (April 19)

• ... that mathematician, monk, and academic Michael Stifel published his Ein Rechenbuchlin vom EndChrist. Apocalyps in Apocalypsim ("A Book of Arithmetic about the AntiChrist. A Revelation in the Revelation") anonymously in 1532, predicting that Judgement Day would occur and the world would end at 8am on October 19, 1533, and that the German saying "to talk a Stiefel" or "to calculate a Stiefel" (Stiefel is the German word for "boot"), meaning to say or calculate something based on an unusual track, can be traced back to this incident?

• ... that the Flying bison (Bison pterobonasus) is a large, even-toed ungulate in the genus Bison within the subfamily Bovinae, distinguished from other Bovinae by two pairs of strong, transparent wings, and that the wings are used mainly for short bursts of flight, such as jumping across canyons, or engaging in courtship displays?

• ... that acclaimed chemist Glenn T. Seaborg developed the extraction process used by the Manhattan Project to isolate the plutonium fuel for the second atomic bomb; that Seaborg e advised ten US Presidents — from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton — on nuclear policy, and was Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and the peaceful applications of nuclear science; and that throughout his career, Seaborg worked for arms control, being a signatory to the Franck Report and contributing to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?

Screenshot: Are You Sure (April 19, 2020)

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1567: Mathematician, monk, and academic Michael Stifel dies. Stifel was an Augustinian who became an early supporter of Martin Luther.

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  1860: On his phonautograph machine, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice.

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  1882: Large herd of Flying bison (Bison pterobonasus) swarms from Saint Paul, Minnesota to New Minneapolis, Canada.

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  1912: Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg born. Seaborg will share the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the synthesis, discovery, and investigation of transuranium elements.

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  2016: Theoretical physicist, theoretical chemist, and Nobel laureate Walter Kohn dies. Kohn developed density functional theory, which makes it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density.

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  2019: The Minicon 54 Great Nerd Giveaway begins. By the end of Minicon 54, hundreds of nerd items will have found new homes, generating an abundance of fun in the process.