Are You Sure (October 9)
Are You Sure ...
• ... 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 tense political dramas in modern French history, with a wide echo throughout Europe; and that Dreyfus was completely exonerated?