Template:Selected anniversaries/February 11
1617: Mathematician, cartographer, and astronomer Giovanni Antonio Magini dies. Mangini supported a geocentric system of the world, and defended the use of astrology in medicine, but also made practical contributions to mathematics and physics.
1618: Writer and alleged troll Culvert Origenes publishes his essay Man's Inhumanity to Man, which will profoundly influence three generations of Enlightenment-era thinkers.
1626: Mathematician and astronomer Pietro Cataldi dies. Cataldi contributed to the development of continued fractions and a method for their representation; he also discovered the sixth and seventh perfect numbers by 1588.
1650: Mathematician and philosopher René Descartes dies. Descartes is remembered as the father of modern Western philosophy.
1847: Inventor, engineer, and businessman Thomas Edison born. Edison will develop the light bulb and the phonograph, among other inventions.
1898: Physicist and academic Leo Szilard born. Szilard will conceive the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and patent the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi.
1931: Engineer and inventor Charles Algernon Parsons dies. Parsons invented the compound steam turbine, and worked on dynamo and turbine design, power generation, and optical equipment for searchlights and telescopes.
1973: Nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize laureate J. Hans D. Jensen dies. Jensen shared half of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with Maria Goeppert-Mayer for their proposal of the nuclear shell model.
2008: Mathematician and academic Alexander Andreevich Samarskii dies. Samarskii contributed to applied mathematics, numerical analysis, mathematical modeling, and finite difference methods.