Are You Sure? (nonfiction)

Are You Sure? is a feature of the Gnomon Chronicles.

January

Are You Sure? (January 1)

• ... that cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy after a trial by the Roman Inquisition, during which Bruno's pantheism was a matter of grave concern, although formal charges cited Bruno's denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation?

• ... that chromatographic analysis of Golden Spiral unexpectedly revealed "at least five hundred and twelve, perhaps two or even four times as many" previously unknown shades of the color yellow?

• ... that mathematician and physician Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus is considered by some to have been the inventor of European porcelain, an invention long accredited to Johann Friedrich Böttger (although others believe that porcelain had been made by English manufacturers at an even earlier date)?

Are You Sure? (January 2)

• ... that AESOP ("Artificial Expert System of Philosophy"), an alleged autonomous artificial intelligence self-propagating in the Earth's ionosphere, has been known to exchange data between unmanned spacecraft?

• ... that physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius' restatement of the Carnot cycle put the theory of heat on a truer and sounder basis?

• ... that Isaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards?

Are You Sure? (January 3)

• ... that astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks made a simple helioscope by focusing the image of the Sun through a telescope onto a plane surface, whereby an image of the Sun could be safely observed?

• ... that computer science pioneer Peter Naur disliked the term "computer science", suggesting it be called "datalogy" or "data science"?

• ... that artist Karl Jones has said that his drawings "fall into two categories: spirals and monsters"?

Are You Sure? (January 4)

• ... that physicist Max Born formulated the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954?

• ... that the capacitor plague, a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors manufactured between 1999 and 2007, has been blamed on the mis-copying of a formula during industrial espionage?

• ... that physicist Erwin Schrödinger addressed the problems of genetics, looking at the phenomenon of life from the point of view of physics, in his book What Is Life?

• ... that the underlying principles of portable envy devices remain unclear, and there is currently no agreed-upon theory explaining why envy is the only emotion which can be migrated into electronic storage devices?

Are You Sure ... (January 5, 2020)

calculated the exact time of a solar eclipse that occurred on 1 April 1764, and that she wrote an article in which she gave a map of the eclipse's extent in 15-minute intervals across Europe?

• ... that mathematician Dmitry Mirimanoff made notable contributions to axiomatic set theory, and to number theory relating specifically to Fermat's last theorem, on which he corresponded with Albert Einstein before the First World War?

• ... that the novels of semiotician and crime-fighter Umberto Eco allegedly contain an encrypted "secret history" of crimes against mathematical constants?

• ... that astronomer and mathematician Simon Marius published his work Mundus Iovialis (1614) describing the planet Jupiter and its moons, and asserting that he discovered the planet's four major moons some days before Galileo Galilei?

Are You Sure ... (January 6, 2020)

• ... that mathematician and physicist Thomas Fincke introduced the modern names of the trigonometric functions tangent and secant in his book Geometria rotundi (1583)?

• ... that objections to Georg Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Henri Poincaré referred to Cantor's ideas as a "grave disease" infecting the discipline of mathematics, and Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth"?

• ... that Jacob Bernoulli derived the first version of the law of large numbers in his work Ars Conjectandi?

Are You Sure ... (January 7, 2020)

• ... that engineer Sandford Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world after missing a train because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m.?

• ... that experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu conducting the Wu experiment (1956), which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity?

• ... that electrical engineer Zénobe Gramme invented the Gramme machine, a type of direct current dynamo capable of generating smoother (less AC) and much higher voltages than earlier dynamos, and that the Gramme machine was thefirst usefully powerful electrical motor that was successful industrially?

• ... that the Reis Telephone can establish a stable transdimensional communications channel with people who have been dead for six hours or longer?

Are You Sure ... (January 8, 2020)

• ... that inventor and crime-fighter Herman Hollerith was issued a US patent for the Art of Applying Gnomon Algorithm Functions — his punched card crime forecasting system?

• ... that pioneering seismologist Sekiya Seikei constructed a model representing the motion of the ground during an earthquake, consisting of three twisted copper wires mounted side by side on a lacquered wooden stand, giving an illustration of the complicated movements of the ground during an earthquake, conveying the complexity of ground motion both in terms of the vagaries of its geometric path and in its erratic accelerations?

• ... that computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA, a computer program capable of engaging humans in a conversation which bore a striking resemblance to one with an empathic psychologist?

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

• ... that the Royal Society posthumously awarded mathematician Georg Cantor its Sylvester Medal, the highest honor the Society can confer for work in mathematics, and that mathematician David Hilbert defended the award from its critics by declaring: "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created"?

• ... that mathematician Maria Agnesi's Instituzioni Analitiche is the first book on mathematics discussing both differential and integral calculus?

• ... that the Praxinoscope (an improved zoetrope) can be converted into a rudimentary scrying engine using simple Gnomon algorithm functions?

• ... that a greedy algorithm does not usually produce an optimal solution, but nonetheless a greedy heuristic may yield locally optimal solutions that approximate a globally optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time?

Are You Sure ... (January 10, 2020)

• ... that the Union ironclad USS Cairo was the first ship ever to be sunk by a mine remotely detonated by hand?

• ... that a musical electroplating ensemble is a musical group which uses electroplating technology to generate music?

• ... that computer scientist Donald Knuth contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it?

• ... that Project Diana marked the birth of radar astronomy later used to map Venus and other nearby planets, and was a necessary precursor to the US space program?

Are You Sure ... (January 11, 2020)

• ... that scientist and bishop Niels Steensen (1 January 1638 – 25 November 1686) questioned explanations for the idea that fossils grow in the ground?

• ... that mathematician, cosmographer, and academic Pedro Nunes (11 January 1502 – 11 August 1578) pioneered the application of mathematics to navigation and cartography?

• ... that computer scientist Tony Hoare (born 11 January 1934) developed Hoare logic for verifying program correctness, and the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes (including the dining philosophers problem)?

Are You Sure ... (January 12, 2020)

• ... that mathematician Pierre de Fermat (1607 – 12 January 1665) discovered an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown?

• ... that author Jack London (12 January 1876 – 22 November 1916) was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone?

• ... that mathematician and academic Hermann Minkowski (22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) showed that Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity can be understood geometrically as a theory of four-dimensional space–time, since known as the "Minkowski spacetime"?

Are You Sure ... (January 13, 2020)

• ... that mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted axioms of set theory, assuming these axioms are consistent, and that the former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs?

• ... that mathematician Max Beckmann wrote "Height, Width, and Depth are the Three Phenomena which I transferred into One Plane to form the abstract surface of The Picture, and thus protect the Infinity of Space from Myself" while under the influence of the experimental transdimensional drug Clandestiphrine?

• ... that physicist and inventor Alexander Stepanovich Popov became interested in oscillations of high frequency electrical currents while trying to solve a problem with the failure in the electrical wire insulation on steel ships, which turned out to be a problem with electrical resonance?

• ... that mathematician Charles Hermite, in a letter to Thomas Joannes Stieltjes, wrote "I turn with terror and horror from this lamentable scourge of continuous functions with no derivatives"?