Are You Sure (October 16)

1609: Physicist, inventor, and crime-fighter Galileo Galilei discovers secret math crime gang in the Vatican, vows to "see them all swing from the ends of ropes, in a mortal demonstration of the immortal Pendulum."

Are You Sure ...

• ... that rabbi, physician, and mathematician Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (16 June 1591 – 16 October 1655) followed lectures by Galileo Galilei during the academic year 1609–1610, and was accorded the rare privilege of using Galileo's own telescope; and that, in the following years, Delmedigo often refers to Galilei as "rabbi Galileo," an ambiguous phrase which may simply mean "my master, Galileo"?

• ... that physicist Gustav Kirchhoff (12 March 1824 – 17 October 1887) contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects; that Kirchhoff coined the term "black body" radiation in 1862; and that two different sets of concepts (one in circuit theory, and one in spectroscopy) are named "Kirchhoff's laws" after him?

• ... that physicist Nicholas Metropolis (11 June 1915 – 17 October 1999) led a group of researchers (including John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam) who developed the Monte Carlo method, a statistical approach to deterministic many-body problems?

—October 16, 2020

gnomonchronicles.com