Calendrical pareidolia

Calendrical pareidolia is the phenomenon of responding to a calendar-based stimulus by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists (pareidolia):

Calendrical stimuli include events such as births and deaths, occurring on the same day in the calendar but otherwise evidencing no causal relationship — and yet of interest.

This article was originally titled Calendrical coincidences.

Calendar

June

June 24

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  1880: Mathematician and academic Oswald Veblen born. His work will find application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. Veblen will publish a paper (1912) on the Four color conjecture.

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  2008: Mathematician and academic Gerhard Ringel dies. Ringel was a pioneer of graph theory and contributed significantly to the proof of the Heawood conjecture (now the Ringel-Youngs theorem), a mathematical problem closely linked with the Four color theorem.

Full June 24 page

July

July 16

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  1945: World War II: The heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis leaves San Francisco with parts for the atomic bomb "Little Boy" bound for Tinian Island. See Manhattan Project.

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  1945: Trinity nuclear weapon test: the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon near Alamogordo, New Mexico. See Manhattan Project.

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  1988: Nuclear physicist Herbert L. Anderson dies. Anderson contributed to the Manhattan Project: he was a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University, and he participated in the first atomic bomb test, code-named Trinity.

Full July 16 page

December

December 13

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  1907: Mathematician and adacemic Emmy Noether receives her Ph.D. degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Erlangen, for a dissertation on algebraic invariants directed by Paul Gordan.

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  1921: Mathematician Max Noether dies. Noether contributed to algebraic geometry and the theory of algebraic functions. He was the father of mathematician Emmy Noether.

Full December 13 page

Fiction cross-reference

• Calendrical Pareidolia
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Days of the year (nonfiction)
• Pareidolia (nonfiction) - a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists (e.g., in random data). Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, the Man in the Moon, the Moon rabbit, hidden messages within recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing indistinct voices in random noise such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.