Template:Selected anniversaries/February 9
1555: Christian Egenolff dies. He was the first important printer and publisher operating from Frankfurt-am-Main.
1619: Physician and philosopher Lucilio Vanini is put to death after being found guilty of atheism and blasphemy. He was the first literate proponent of the thesis that humans evolved from apes.
1737: Thomas Paine born. He will author the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and inspire the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.
1863: Surgeon and scientist Joseph Lister performs emergency field surgery on fellow surgeon and alleged time-traveller Asclepius Myrmidon, saving Myrmidon's life. Lister will later privately reported that his theories on surgical hygiene "were resolutely confirmed and endorsed, nay demanded, by Myrmidon."
1884: Mathematician, physicist, and APTO field engineer Sofia Kovalevskaya uses symmetric top in which two moments of inertia are equal, the third is half as large, and the center of gravity is located in the plane perpendicular to the symmetry axis (parallel to the plane of the two equal points) to defeat the the Forbidden ratio in single combat.
1907: Mathematician and academic Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter born. He will become of the greatest geometers of the 20th century.
1913: A group of meteors is visible across much of the eastern seaboard of North and South America, leading astronomers to conclude the source had been a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth.
1927: Computer scientist and academic David Wheeler born. He will contribute to the development of the Electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) and the Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT); help develop the subroutine; and gave the first explanation of how to design software libraries.
1936: Inventor and APTO field cryptographer Edward Hugh Hebern discovers new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which use rotor encryption machines to generate cryptographic numina.
1979: Physicist and engineer Dennis Gabor dies. He invented holography, for which he received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.
2010: Businessman Walter Frederick Morrison dies. Morrison invented the Frisbee. The first version, a cake pan purchased for a nickle and sold for a quarter, was known as the Flyin' Cake Pan.