February 7

Are You Sure ...

• ... that mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote his 1940 essay "A Mathematician's Apology", justifying his life's work in mathematics, because he felt the approach of old age and the decline of his mathematical creativity and skills, and that by devoting time to writing the Apology, Hardy was admitting that his own time as a creative mathematician was finished?

• ... that the science fiction comedy television series Gilligan's Matrix is loosely based on both Gilligan's Island and The Matrix?

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1877: Mathematician and geneticist G. H. Hardy born. He will prefer his work to be considered pure mathematics, perhaps because of his detestation of war and the military uses to which mathematics had been applied.

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  1889: Engineer and theorist Harry Nyquist born. He will do early theoretical work on determining the bandwidth requirements for transmitting information, laying the foundations for later advances by Claude Shannon, which will lead to the development of information theory.

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  1897: Physicist and electrical engineer Galileo Ferraris dies. He was a pioneer of AC power systems, and inventor of the induction motor.

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  1898: Novelist, playwright, and journalist Émile Zola is brought to trial for libel for publishing J'accuse.

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  1960: Physicist and academic Igor Kurchatov dies. Kurchatov played a leading role in the Soviet Union's clandestine nuclear weapons program, culminating in the First Lightning bomb test.

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  Premiere of Replicant Vice, an American crime drama television series starring Harrison Ford and Roy Batty.

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  1999: NASA launches the spacecraft Stardust. On January 2, 2004 it will fly by comet Wild 2, collecting dust samples which will return to earth on 15 January 2006.