October 16
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1655: Physician, mathematician, and theorist Joseph Solomon Delmedigo dies. His Elim (Palms) deals with astronomy, physics, mathematics, medicine, metaphysics, and music theory.
1797: Carl Friedrich Gauss records in his diary that he has discovered a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
1843: Sir William Rowan Hamilton comes up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers.
1970: Physicist Shoichi Sakata dies. Sakata contributed theoretical work on the structure of the atom, proposing the Sakata model, an early precursor to the quark model. After World War II he campaigned for the peaceful uses of nuclear power.