Template:Selected anniversaries/May 31
1683: Physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Jean-Pierre Christin born. He will invent the Celsius thermometer.
1831: Engineer and naval architect Samuel Bentham dies. He designed the first Panopticon.
1836: Mathematician and crime-fighter Karl Georg Christian von Staudt publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions based on synthetic geometry to provide a foundation for detecting and preventing crimes against mathematical constants.
1860: First known use of Pascal's calculator in time travel experiments.
1912: Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu born. She will conduct the Wu experiment, which will contradict the hypothetical law of conservation of parity.
2003: The unmanned spacecraft Genesis receives a warning from AESOP, the alleged autonomous artificial intelligence living in the Earth's ionosphere, about "return capsule parachute failure". The Genesis capsule will crash-land in Utah on September 8, 2004, after a design flaw prevents the deployment of its drogue parachute.
2016: Signed first edition of Taffy Bomb purchased for an undisclosed amount by "a celebrity Gnomon algorithm theorist born and raised in New Minneapolis, Canada."