Template:Selected anniversaries/May 16

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  1821: Mathematician and statistician Pafnuty Chebyshev born. He will prove Chebyshev's inequality (also called the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality), which guarantees that, for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean.

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  1830: Mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier dies. He initiated the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations.

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  1888: The Orcagna scrying engine previews Nikola Tesla's speech on alternating current technology.

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  1888: Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture describing the equipment which will allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.

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  1968: Mathematician and crime-fighter Jacques-Louis Lions publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which use partial differential equations and stochastic control to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.

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  2017: Math photographer Cantor Parabola wins Pulitzer Prize for "unique and peerless accomplishments in four-dimensional photography."