February 26

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  1616: Physicist and engineer Galileo Galilei is formally banned by the Roman Catholic Church from teaching or defending the view that the earth orbits the sun.

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  1638: Mathematician and linguist Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac dies. He was the earliest writer who discussed the solution of indeterminate equations by means of continued fractions. He also did work in number theory and found a method of constructing magic squares.

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  1786: Mathematician and politician François Arago born. He will observe that a rotating plate of copper tends to communicate its motion to a magnetic needle suspended over it, an effect which will later be known as eddy current.

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  1878: Astronomer and Jesuit priest Angelo Secchi dies. Secchi was a pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy, and was one of the first scientists to state authoritatively that the Sun is a star.

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  2005: Computer scientist Jef Raskin dies. He was a human–computer interface expert best known for conceiving and starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s.