Template:Selected anniversaries/December 16
1653: Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.
1887: Polymath and crime-fighter Francis Galton publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
1905: Mathematician, author, and poet Piet Hein born. He will propose the use of superellipses in architecture; superellipses will become the hallmark of modern Scandinavian architecture.
1947: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain build the first practical point-contact transistor.
2012: Signed first edition of Electrical Storm voted Image of the Day by the citizens of New Minneapolis, Canada.
2017: Steganographic analysis of Red Spiral unexpectedly reveals "at least three hundred and fifty kilobytes" of encrypted data relating to the color red.