January 1
1548: Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno born. He will be burned at the stake (17 February 1600).
1748: Mathematician Johann Bernouli dies. He made important contributions to infinitesimal calculus.
1891: Astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a "stellar object" that moved against the background of stars. At first he thought it was a fixed star, but once he noticed that it moved, he became convinced it was a planet, or as he called it, "a new star", now known as the dwarf planet Ceres.
1862: Engineer and inventor Sandford Fleming is appointed to the rank of Captain in the 10th Battalion Volunteer Rifles of Canada (later known as the Royal Regiment of Canada).
1878: Mathematician and engineer Agner Krarup Erlang born. He will invent the fields of traffic engineering, queueing theory, and telephone networks analysis.
1894: Physicist, mathematician, and academic Satyendra Nath Bose born. His work on quantum mechanics will provide the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate.
1992: Computer scientist and Admiral Grace Hopper dies. She pioneered computer programming techniques, inventing one of the first compilers, and popularizing machine-independent programming languages (leading to the development of COBOL).