Template:Selected anniversaries/May 16
1821: Mathematician and statistician Pafnuty Chebyshev born. He will prove Chebyshev's inequality (also called the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality), which guarantees that, for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean.
1830: Mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier dies. He initiated the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations.
1888: The Orcagna scrying engine previews Nikola Tesla's speech on alternating current technology.
1888: Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture describing the equipment which will allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.
1968: Mathematician and crime-fighter Jacques-Louis Lions publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which use partial differential equations and stochastic control to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
2017: Math photographer Cantor Parabola wins Pulitzer Prize for "unique and peerless accomplishments in four-dimensional photography."