Template:Selected anniversaries/December 5
1872: The crewless American ship Mary Celeste is found by the Canadian brig Dei Gratia. The ship had been abandoned for nine days but was only slightly damaged.
1873: Newly discovered illustration of The Eel fighting Neptune Slaughter is "almost certainly a record of events related to the abandonment of Mary Celeste," says math photographer Cantor Parabola.
1901: Physicist and academic Werner Heisenberg born. He will introduce the uncertainty principle -- in quantum mechanics, any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle can be known.
1923: Photograph says it captured moment of Evil bit release.
1932: German-born Swiss physicist Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.
1964: Color commentators announce formation of Color Commentator's Union.
1966: George Plimpton embeds himself within Color Commentator's Union as participatory journalist.
1999: Mathematician Nathan Jacobson dies. He conducted research on the structure theory of rings without finiteness conditions--a subject closely related to the theory of algebras--which transformed the approach to classical results and broke ground for solutions to problems inaccessible by previous methods.