Template:On This Day (nonfiction)/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.
1832: Mathematician and social activist Évariste Galois from wounds suffered in a duel. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem standing for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra, and the subfield of Galois connections.
1912: Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu born. She will conduct the Wu experiment, which will contradict the law of conservation of parity, proving that parity is not conserved.