March 31

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  1596: Mathematician and philosopher René Descartes born. Descartes will be remembered as the father of modern Western philosophy.

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  1730: Mathematician and theorist Étienne Bézout born. Bezout's Théorie générale des équations algébriques will contain much new and valuable matter on the theory of elimination and symmetrical functions of the roots of an equation.

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  1877: Mathematician and philosopher Antoine Augustin Cournot dies. Cournot introduced the ideas of functions and probability into economic analysis.

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  1943: Publication of The Glass Tweet Game, the last full-length tweet-chain by author and alleged time-traveler Hermann Hesse.

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  1970: The spacecraft Explorer 1 re-enters the Earth's atmosphere after 12 years in orbit. Explorer 1 was the first satellite launched by the United States.

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  2001: Physicist and academic Clifford Shull dies. Shull shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics with Bertram Brockhouse for the development of the neutron scattering technique.