Template:Selected anniversaries/March 31
1596: Mathematician and philosopher René Descartes born. He will be remembered as the father of modern Western philosophy.
1861: USS Cairo retrofitted with military scrying engine device.
1877: Mathematician and philosopher Antoine Augustin Cournot dies. He introduced the ideas of functions and probability into economic analysis.
1967: Mathematician and crime-fighter Robin Farquharson publishes proof that most voting systems are vulnerable to crimes against mathematical constants.
1971: Mathematician and crime-fighter Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter uses his famous loxodromic sequence of tangent circles to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
2001: Physicist and academic Clifford Shull dies. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics with Bertram Brockhouse for the development of the neutron scattering technique.
2003: Mathematician and academic Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter dies. He was one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century.
2004: Mathematician Tan Lei and crime-fighter publishes study of complex dynamics and functions of complex numbers with applications in the detection and prevention of crimes against mathematical constants.