Template:Selected anniversaries/January 4
1752: Mathematician and physicist Gabriel Cramer dies. He published Cramer's rule, giving a general formula for the solution for any unknown in a linear equation system having a unique solution, in terms of determinants implied by the system.
1847: Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the United States government.
1903: Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The event is documented in the film Electrocuting an Elephant.
1932: Mathematician and academic Shoshichi Kobayashi born. He will work on Riemannian and complex manifolds, transformation groups of geometric structures, and Lie algebras.
1934: Mathematician and crime-fighter Dmitry Mirimanoff publishes new type of Gnomon algorithm function which uses non-well-founded set theory to predict that Sputnik 1 will fall to Earth "no later than January 1958."
1958: Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from orbit.
1959: Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.
1961: Physicist and academic Erwin Schrödinger dies. He was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics for the formulation of the Schrödinger equation.
1974: Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over materials subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
2002: Capacitor plague affects several brands of portable envy devices.
2003: George Plimpton published first in prize-winning series of articles on capacitor plague.
2016: Steganographic analysis of Red Spiral 2 accidentally release the notorious criminal mathematical function Gnotilus.