jlynch | April 30, 2007Events
1753 - Publication of Species Plantarum by Linnaeus,
1930 - The "planet" Pluto is officially named.
1956 - The polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is made available to the public.
Births
1852 - Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish neuroscientist, Nobel laureate
1881 - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French palaeontologist and philosopher
1918 - Gersh Budker, Russian physicist
Deaths
1772 - Gottfried Achenwall, German statistician
1899 - Ludwig Büchner, German philosopher and physician
jlynch | April 29, 2007
Events
1006 - Supernova SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history, appears in the constellation Lupus.
1993 - The World Wide Web was born at CERN.
Births
1723 - Mathurin Jacques Brisson, French naturalist
1777 - Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician
1829 - Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Austrian geologist
1876 - Orso Mario Corbino, Italian physicist
1916 - Claude Shannon, American engineer and mathematician
Deaths
1696 - Robert Plot, British naturalist
1865 - Robert Fitzroy, English admiral, meteorologist, and captain of HMS Beagle (above)
jlynch | April 28, 2007
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living."
Births
1854 - Henri Poincaré, French mathematician and physicist (source of above quote)
Deaths
1768 - Georg Brandt, Swedish chemist and minerologist
1793 - John Michell, English scientist
1798 - Nikolaus Poda von Neuhaus, German entomologist
1916 - Jørgen Pedersen Gram, Danish mathematician
jlynch | April 27, 2007Births
1765 - Sylvestre François Lacroix, French mathematician
1868 - Georgy Voronoy, Russian mathematician
1900 - Jan Oort, Dutch astronomer
1906 - Kurt Gödel, Austrian mathematician
1928 - Eugene M. Shoemaker, American astronomer
1941 - K. Barry Sharpless, American chemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1858 - Johannes Peter Müller, German physiologist
1946 - Louis Bachelier, French mathematician
1999 - Arthur Leonard Schawlow, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | April 26, 2007Events
2002 - The last successful telemetry from NASA space probe Pioneer 10.
Births
1755 - Marc-Antoine Parseval, French mathematician
1791 - Samuel F. B. Morse, American inventor
1820 - Herbert Spencer, English philosopher and social evolutionist
1913 - Philip Hauge Abelson, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1920 - Mark Krasnosel'skii, Russian-Ukrainian mathematician
1927 - Karl Alexander Müller, Swiss physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1932 - Gian-Carlo Rota, Italian-born mathematician and philosopher
Deaths
1936 - Karl Pearson, English statistician and biometrician
1952 - Guido…
jlynch | April 26, 2007So I noticed that visits to the blog ramped up after 2100 EST tonight with traffic increasing ten-fold. And the reason? Grey's Anatomy mentioned this little blighter.
jlynch | April 26, 2007I was going to post a note on Shelly's run-in with the Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture regarding fair-use of a published graph. I was going to run a copy of the offending graph. But all
seems to be ok now and the journal has backed down, blaming the issue on "a misunderstanding inadvertently caused by a junior member of staff." All good ... but I'm sure this will come up again.
jlynch | April 25, 2007Events
1962 - Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
1994 - Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.
Births
1774 - Christian Leopold von Buch, German geologist
1785 - John James Audubon, French-American naturalist and illustrator
1879 - Owen Willans Richardson, British physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1900 - Charles Richter, American geophysicist
1932 - Michael Smith, English-born chemist, Nobel laureate
1933 - Arno Allan Penzias, German-born physicist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1920 - Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician
1940 - Carl Bosch, German chemist…
jlynch | April 25, 2007I'll admit to spending way too much time lurking at Fark.com. Today the site underwent a re-design and the punters aren't happy. The new layout is ugly (particularly on a wide screen), it loads slooooow, and Firfox extensions no longer work. People on this thread are complaining and things are being made worse by an idiot moderator ("Jeff") telling people - even paid subscribers - to essentially STFU. Pity. It was good while it lasted.
jlynch | April 24, 2007
Events
1953 - Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish Molecular structure of nucleic acids:
a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid describing the double helix structure of DNA.
Births
1710 - James Ferguson, Scottish astronomer
1849 - Felix Klein, German mathematician
1874 - Guglielmo Marconi, Italian inventor, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics
1900 - Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, Austrian-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1903 - Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov, Russian mathematician
1918 - Gerard Henri de Vaucouleurs, French astronomer
1931 - Felix Berezin, Russian mathematician…
jlynch | April 23, 2007Events
1967 - Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 becoming the first human to die during a space mission.
1990 - STS-31: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Births
1899 - Oscar Zariski, Russian-born mathematician
1947 - Roger D. Kornberg, American chemist
Deaths
1656 - Thomas Fincke, Danish mathematician and physicist
1960 - Max von Laue, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1964 - Gerhard Domagk, German bacteriologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (declined)
jlynch | April 22, 2007Events
1827 - William Rowan Hamilton presents his Theory of systems of rays.
Births
1628 - Johann van Waveren Hudde, Dutch mathematician
1746 - Félix Vicq-d'Azyr, French physician and anatomist
1775 - William Turner, English ornithologist
1792 - John Thomas Romney Robinson, Irish astronomer and physicist
1858 - Max Planck, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1867 - Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, Danish scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1901 - E.B. Ford, British ecological geneticist
Deaths
1895 - Carl Ludwig, German physician
jlynch | April 21, 2007Events
1993 - The web browser Mosaic version 1.0 is released.
Births
1692 - James Stirling, Scottish mathematician
1876 - Robert Bárány, American physician, Nobel laureate
1884 - Otto Rank, Austrian psychologist
1891 - Harold Jeffreys, English astronomer
1904 - Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist
1907 - Ivan Efremov, Russian paleontologist and author
1909 - Rita Levi-Montalcini, Italian neurologist, Nobel laureate
1910 - Norman Steenrod, American mathematician
1919 - Donald J. Cram, American chemist, Nobel laureate
1922 - Wolf V. Vishniac, American microbiologist
Deaths
1758 -…
jlynch | April 21, 2007Another semester is drawing to a close. Readers will notice that I've been more-or-less AWOL for the past few months - a combination of deadlines (hit and missed) and teaching have kept me busy beyond belief. The good news is that I expect things to ease off starting sometime next week and to certainly be a lot clearer by mid-May (when I return from a week-long workshop on the utility of the history of science at the MBL in Woods
Hole).
Equally as good news is that three of my undergraduates successfully defended their honors theses. Congratulations go to Leslie, Matt & Ashley for a job…
jlynch | April 21, 2007Events
1994 - Confirmation of the first extrasolar planets (around pulsar PSR B1257+12) is announced by Alexander Wolszczan.
Births
1652 - Michel Rolle, French mathematician
1774 - Jean-Baptiste Biot, French physicist
1882 - Percy Williams Bridgman, American physicist, Nobel laureate
1889 - Paul Karrer, Swiss chemist, Nobel laureate
1951 - Michael Hartley Freedman, American mathematician
Deaths
1557 - Petrus Apianus, German mathematician
1719 - Philippe de la Hire, French mathematician and historian
1825 - Johann Friedrich Pfaff, German mathematician
1965 - Edward Victor Appleton,…
jlynch | April 19, 2007Roll call is reporting that the FBI has raided a business tied to Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) as part of an ongoing investigation into the lawmaker. Knowledgeable readers may remember that there are suspicions that Paul Charlton, the former U.S. Attorney in Arizona, was deep-sixed by Alberto Gonzalez in part because of his probe into Renzi's activities.
Details of the raid on Patriot Insurance Agency in Sonoita, Ariz., were not immediately available. Renzi's most recent financial disclosure form lists the business as an asset belonging to his wife, Roberta, and valued at $1 million to $5…
jlynch | April 19, 2007Events
1862 - The first pasteurization test completed by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard.
1902 - Pierre and Marie Curie refine radium chloride.
Births
1745 - Philippe Pinel, French physician
1904 - George Stibitz, American scientist
1918 - Kai Siegbahn, Swedish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1927 - Karl Alexander Müller, Swiss physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1928 - Gerald S. Hawkins, English astronomer
Deaths
1831 - John Abernethy, English surgeon
1918 - Karl Ferdinand Braun, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1932 - Giuseppe Peano, Italian mathematician
2003 - Bernard Katz, German-…
jlynch | April 18, 2007
Events
1971 - Launch of Salyut 1, the first space station.
Births
1874 - Ernst Rüdin, Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist, and eugenicist
1883 - Richard von Mises, Austrian-born mathematician
1912 - Glenn Seaborg, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1567 - Michael Stifel, German mathematician
1739 - Nicholas Saunderson, English mathematician
1831 - Johann Gottlieb Friedrich von Bohnenberger, German mathematician
1854 - Robert Jameson, Scottish naturalist
1882 - Charles Darwin, English biologist (above)
1906 - Pierre Curie, French physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1914 - Charles…
jlynch | April 17, 2007
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Births
1838 - Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, French scientist
1905 - George H. Hitchings, American scientist, Nobel laureate
1940 - Joseph L. Goldstein, American scientist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1674 - John Graunt, English statistician
1796…
jlynch | April 16, 2007I don't really have much to add to what people are saying about the terrible tragedy in Virginia. Suffice it to say, that any of us involved in education felt the sheer mindless unexplainable stupidity of it. As I stood in-front of my class of 150 (mostly) soon-to-be graduating seniors at 3pm yesterday, I found myself looking at the exits and wondering what would happen if a gunman entered.
A number of years ago here at ASU there was a discussion about allowing firearms on campus. A proffered solution was to arm professors.
Thirteen years in this country, and I still don't understand why…