January 6
1561: Mathematician and physicist Thomas Fincke born. He will introduce the modern names of the trigonometric functions tangent and secant.
1655: Mathematician Jacob Bernoulli born. He will discover the fundamental mathematical constant e, and make important contributions to the field of probability.
1796: Natural scientist, explorer, and clergyman Erik Laxmann dies. Laxmann contribute to the taxonomy of Siberian fauna, and attempted to establish relations between Imperial Russia and Tokugawa Japan.
1918: Mathematician and philosopher Georg Cantor dies. He invented set theory, a fundamental area of mathematical inquiry.
1931: Inventor Thomas Edison signs his last patent application.
1990: Physicist and academic Pavel Cherenkov dies. Cherenkov shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934.