Template:Selected anniversaries/August 5
1802: Mathematician and theorist Niels Henrik Abel born. Abel will make pioneering contributions in a variety of fields, including the discovery of Abelian functions, and the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals.
1816: The British Admiralty dismisses Francis Ronalds's new invention of the first working electric telegraph as "wholly unnecessary", preferring to continue using the semaphore.
1901: "Fightin'" Bert Russell agrees to fight three rounds of bare-knuckled boxing at World Peace Conference.
1910: Mathematician Julius Petersen dies. His famous paper Die Theorie der regulären graphs is a fundamental contribution to modern graph theory.
1914: In Cleveland, Ohio, the first electric traffic light is installed.
1920: Artist George Tooker born. His paintings will depict his subjects naturally, as in a photograph, but the images will use flat tones, an ambiguous perspective, and alarming juxtapositions to suggest an imagined or dreamed reality.
1994: Cryptanalyst and mathematician Solomon Kullback dies. Krullback began his career with the US Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s; when the National Security Agency (NSA) was formed in 1952, Rowlett become chief of cryptanalysis, overseeing the research and development of computerized cryptanalysis.