April 14
1126: Polymath Ibn Rushd (Averoess) born. He will write on logic, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, theology, Islamic jurisprudence, psychology, politics, music theory, geography, mathematics, and the mediæval sciences of medicine, astronomy, physics, and celestial mechanics.
1527: Cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius born. Ortelius will create the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. He will also be one of the first to imagine that the continents were joined together before drifting to their present positions.
1629: Mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Christiaan Huygens born. He will be a leading scientist of his time.
1659: Proposals to flood the Sistine chapel "are equally useless to Science and Art alike," writes Christiaan Huygens in a private letter to Pope Alexander VII.
1935: Mathematician Emmy Noether dies. She made landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics.
1964: Mathematician and theorist Tatyana Afanasyeva dies. She contributed to statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics, and to mathematical education in the Netherlands.