October 9

Are You Sure ... (October 9, 2020)

CIA officer Left: E. Howard Hunt. Right: "Three tramps" arrested after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

• ... that American intelligence officer and writer E. Howard Hunt (9 October 1918 – 23 January 2007) was a CIA officer from 1949 to 1970; that Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy and others, planned and committed burglaries and other criminal undercover operations for the Nixon administration; and that after Hunt's death, his sons, Howard St. John Hunt and David Hunt, stated publicly that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy?

• ... that mathematician and astronomer David Gregory (3 June 1659 – 10 October 1708) was "the first to openly teach the doctrines of the Principia, in a public seminary ... in those days ... a daring innovation."?

• ... that mathematician, scholar, and poet Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac (9 October 1581 – 26 February 1638) wrote a translation, from Greek to Latin, of the Arithmetica of Diophantus; and that it was this very translation in which Pierre de Fermat wrote his famous margin note claiming that he had a proof of Fermat's last theorem; and that the same text renders Diophantus' term παρισὀτης as adaequalitat, which became Fermat's technique of adequality, a pioneering method of infinitesimal calculus?

• ... that French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus (9 October 1859 – 12 July 1935) was falsely accused of treason, brought to trial, and convicted in 1884; that his enemies were motivated by anti-Semitism; that his trial became one of the most sensational political dramas in modern French history, with effects throughout Europe; and that Dreyfus was completely exonerated?

Screenshot: Are You Sure (October 9, 2020)

On This Day in History and Fiction

• 

  1581: Mathematician and linguist Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac born. He will do work in number theory and find a method of constructing magic squares.

• 

  1775: A paper by Leonhard Euler, Speculationes circa quasdam insignes proprietates numerorum, was presented at the Saint-Petersburg Academy. In this paper, he revisits the idea that has come to be called Euler's Phi function. He first introduced the idea to the Academy on Oct 15,1759 but did not include a symbol or name. Euler defined the function as "the multitude of numbers less than D, and which have no common divisor with it."

• 

  1859: Alfred Dreyfus born. He will be wrongly convicted of treason during the Dreyfus affair.

• 

  1903: "Fightin'" Bert Russell agrees to fight three rounds of bare-knuckled boxing at World Peace Conference.

• 

  1918: CIA officer and author E. Howard Hunt born. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Hunt will plot the Watergate burglaries and other undercover operations for the Nixon administration.

• 

  1948: Mathematician Joseph Wedderburn dies. He made significant contributions to algebra, proving that a finite division algebra is a field, and proving part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras.