January 24
1798: Mathematician Karl Georg Christian von Staudt born. He will use synthetic geometry to provide a foundation for arithmetic.
1879: Glassblower, physicist, and inventor Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Geißler dies. He invented the Geissler tube, made of glass and used as a low pressure gas-discharge luminescence tube.
1961: Goldsboro B-52 crash: A bomber carrying two H-bombs breaks up in mid-air over North Carolina. The uranium core of one weapon remains lost.
1978: Soviet satellite Kosmos 954, with a nuclear reactor on board, burns up in Earth's atmosphere, scattering radioactive debris over Canada's Northwest Territories. Only 1% is recovered.
1988: Mathematician and academic Werner Fenchel dies. He established the basic results of convex analysis and nonlinear optimization theory which would, in time, serve as the foundation for nonlinear programming.
2016: Cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky dies. Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal microscope (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope).