Template:Selected anniversaries/April 28: Difference between revisions
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
Line 80: | Line 80: | ||
||1999: Arthur Leonard Schawlow dies ... physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate ... co-inventor of the laser with Charles Townes. His central insight, which Townes overlooked, was the use of two mirrors as the resonant cavity to take MASER action to visible wavelengths. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers. | ||1999: Arthur Leonard Schawlow dies ... physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate ... co-inventor of the laser with Charles Townes. His central insight, which Townes overlooked, was the use of two mirrors as the resonant cavity to take MASER action to visible wavelengths. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers. | ||
||2004: | ||2004: Alex Randolph dies ... designer of board games and writer. Randolph's game creations include TwixT, Breakthru, Inkognito (with Leo Colovini), Raj, Ricochet Robot, and Enchanted Forest (with Michael Matschoss). Pic. | ||
||2007: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker dies ... physicist and philosopher. | ||2007: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker dies ... physicist and philosopher. Pic. | ||
||2013: John C. Reynolds dies ... computer scientist and academic. | ||2013: John C. Reynolds dies ... computer scientist and academic. Pic. | ||
||2016: Ingram Olkin dies ... professor emeritus and chair of statistics and education at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is known for developing statistical analysis for evaluating policies, particularly in education, and for his contributions to meta-analysis, statistics education, multivariate analysis, and majorization theory. Pic. | ||2016: Ingram Olkin dies ... professor emeritus and chair of statistics and education at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is known for developing statistical analysis for evaluating policies, particularly in education, and for his contributions to meta-analysis, statistics education, multivariate analysis, and majorization theory. Pic. |
Revision as of 06:23, 18 September 2019
1402: Aztec philosopher, warrior, architect, poet, and ruler Nezahualcoyotl born. He will have an experience of an "Unknown, Unknowable Lord of Everywhere" to whom he will build an entirely empty temple in which no blood sacrifices of any kind will be allowed.
1693: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz writes to L'Hospital, announcing his discovery of determinants fifty years before Cramer, who was the real driving force in the development of determinants. Leibniz's work had little or no influence because it was not published until 1850 in his Mathematische Schriften.
1774: Astronomer Francis Baily born. He will observe "Baily's beads" during an annular eclipse (1836).
1817: Carl Friedrich Gauss writes to the astronomer H. W. M. Oblers, saying, "I am becoming more and more convinced that the necessity of our (Euclidean) geometry cannot be proved, at least not by human intellect nor for the human intellect."
1847: Mathematician Leopold Kronecker uses number theory to predict and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
1868: Mathematician Georgy Voronoy born. He will invent what are today called Voronoi diagrams or Voronoi tessellations.
1906: Mathematician, philosopher, and academic Kurt Gödel born. His two incompleteness theorems will have an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century.
1928: Geologist and astronomer Eugene Merle Shoemaker born. Shoemaker will be the first scientist to conclude that Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona, and similar craters, were caused by meteor impact.
1985: A brief, transient outbreak of Geometrical frustration affects nuclear reactors around the world. The outbreak will last only a few microseconds, and there will be no signs of damage to any of the reactors. The event will later be recognized as a precursor to the Chernobyl disaster.
1986: High levels of radiation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster are detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden, leading Soviet authorities to publicly announce the accident.
1986: Celebrity time-traveller Radium Jane visits the stricken Chernobyl reactor, calls it "a waste of good fissionable material."
2017: New survey shows that Fantasy Voronoi diagram is more popular than Fantasy Football.
2017: Signed first edition of Swirl is purchased for an undisclosed amount by "an eminent Gnomon algorithm theorist living in New Minneapolis, Canada."