Template:Selected anniversaries/August 31
1551: Explorer and alleged time-traveller Cornelis de Houtman publishes "The Legend of Neptune Slaughter, a Tale of Monstrous Disaster from Beyond the Islands and the Oceans of the Furthest East."
1635: Mathematician, theologian, and crime-fighter Marin Mersenne uses new theory of acoustics to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
1897: Thomas Edison patents the Kinetoscope, the first movie projector.
1899: Georg Cantor writes to Dedekind, remarking that his "diagonal process" could be used to show that the power set of a set has more elements than the set itself.
1938: Mathematician and crimefighter Haskell Curry discovers new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which detect and prevent crimes against combinatorial mathematics.
1945: Mathematician and academic Stefan Banach dies. Banach was one of the founders of modern functional analysis.
1950: Mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel addresses the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on his work in relativity theory.
2006: Flow Chart voted Picture of the Day by the citizens of New Minneapolis, Canada.
2017: Signed first edition of The Eel Discovers Time Travel sells for two and a half million dollars."