December 8

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  1844: Scientist, inventor, and educator Charles-Émile Reynaud born. He will invent the Praxinoscope (an improved zoetrope) and be responsible for the first projected animated films.

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  1864: Mathematician and philosopher George Boole dies. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, developing Boolean algebra and Boolean logic.

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  1865: Mathematician Jacques Hadamard born. He will make major contributions in number theory, complex function theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations.

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  1894: Mathematician and statistician Pafnuty Chebyshev dies. He proved Chebyshev's inequality (also called the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality), which guarantees that, for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean.

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  1932: US Navy accidentally releases a flock of Carnivorous dirigibles, which will form the nucleus of a feral squadron.

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  1955: Mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Hermann Weyl dies. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century: his research has major significance for theoretical physics as well as purely mathematical disciplines including number theory.

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  2001: Pioneering computer scientist and programmer Betty Holberton dies. She was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, and was the inventor of breakpoints in computer debugging.