otd

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1 Satyendra Nath Bose, who established the proper state counting for indistinguishable and non-interacting particles that do not obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, work which he sent to Einstein in 1924, was born #OTD in 1894. Image: Courtesy Falguni Sarkar/The S.N. Bose Project
2 Edwin Hubble announced that Andromeda and other spiral nebulae were separate galaxies outside the Milky Way, in a paper read to a @AAAS meeting by H.N. Russell #OTD in 1925. He built on observations by Slipher and relied on Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s studies of Cepheid variables.
3 Lynn Conway, electricial engineer and computer scientist, co-architect of the VLSI design revolution, and transgender activist, was born #OTD in 1938. She invented Dynamic Instruction Scheduling at IBM, but was fired when they learned she was transitioning. Photo: Lynn Conway
4 Isaac Asimov, a scientist and prolific popularizer of science, one of the greats of science fiction, may have been born #OTD in 1920. He couldn’t say for sure. But today is the date he chose to celebrate.  Photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images
5 Artificial transmutation of elements! Ernest Rutherford began a series of experiments #OTD in 1919, with significant but sometimes misreported results. Credit: George Grantham Bain Collection (LOC)
6 Physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton was born #OTD in 1643. He revolutionized our understanding of mathematics, mechanics, gravity, and optics, and foiled counterfeiters as warden of the Royal Mint. Portrait: Barrington Bramley, after Godfrey Kneller
7 The dwarf planet Eris was discovered by astronomers Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz #OTD in 2005. There it is, the tiny moving dot on the left of the gif. Image: Mike Brown (@plutokiller)
8 The German physicist Martin Brendel took the first photograph of an aurora #OTD in 1892, at Alta fjord in northern Norway.
9 Jean Bernard Léon Foucault experimentally demonstrated the rotation of the Earth #OTD in 1851, setting in motion a 2m-long pendulum with a 5kg brass bob, and observing the slow rotation of its plane of oscillation. Video: Foucault pendulum at @msichicago
10 Physicist Marguerite Perey discovered Francium #OTD in 1939. It was the last element to be found in a naturally occurring state, rather than synthesized. Image: Musée Curie/ACJC Collection
11 Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently conceived of a theory of evolution via natural selection that was presented alongside Darwin’s theory in a paper read to the Linnean Society in 1858, was born #OTD in 1823. 
12 Alfred Russel Wallace, Bryce DeWitt, and Stephen Hawking were all born #OTD. Threads on Wallace and Hawking are up, will add DeWitt if I get a chance. Images: unknown; UT Physics History; Santi Visalli/Getty
13 Stephen Hawking was born #OTD in 1942. He developed theorems with Penrose that determine when general relativity produces singularities, established classical laws of black hole mechanics, and hypothesized that quantum effects make black holes radiate. Image: Santi Visalli/Getty
14 I have read your paper with the greatest interest. I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem so simply. The analytical treatment of the problem appears to me splendid. –– Einstein's letter to Schwarzschild, #OTD in 1916
15 Mathematician Ruth Moufang, known for extending Hilbert's axioms for plane geometry to projective geometry, was born #OTD in 1905. The Nazis dismissed her from teaching, but she later became the first German woman professor of mathematics. (Credit in image description)
16 Project Diana pointed an SCR-271 bed-spring radar antenna at the rising moon #OTD in 1946 and broadcast a series of short signals. Each signal echoed off the moon and returned about 2.5s later, proving that radio could penetrate the ionosphere.
17 Young astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar presented his results on electron degeneracy pressure and the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star to a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society #OTD in 1935. Beyond that lies neutron stars and black holes. Photo: Getty Images
18 Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the Italian mathematician who invented tensor calculus, was born #OTD in 1853. His early work built on ideas of Gauss, Riemann, and Christoffel; later contributions were done primarily in collaboration with his student Tullio Levi-Civita.
19 The British Parliament passed the “Act Against Multipliers” #OTD in 1404. The law forbid alchemists from creating precious metals like gold or silver. It was repealed in 1688 due to the efforts of Robert Boyle, whose work was laying the foundations of modern chemistry.
20 Happy Titanniversary! The intrepid Huygens probe descended through Titan's hazy atmosphere and landed on its surface #OTD in 2005. We’ll be back with a rotorcraft in 2034. Images: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
21 Mathematician Alfred Tarski was born #OTD in 1901. The Banach-Tarski paradox asserts that a ball in three dimensions can be decomposed into a finite number of pieces which, after translation and rotation, can be reassembled into *two* distinct copies of the original ball.
22 Sofya Kovalevskaya was born #OTD in 1850. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics in modern Europe, be appointed to a university chair, and join the editorial board of a scientific journal. She also won the Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Science.
23 John Cocke and Mike Disney made the first observation of an optical pulsar, in the Crab Nebula, #OTD in 1969. Barely a year after Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery of pulsars, it was strong evidence that a neutron star is the remnant of supernova. Image: Nature, Vol. 221 No. 5180
24 Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras...  The remarkable mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan sent his letter to the Godfrey Harold Hardy at Cambridge #OTD in 1913.
25 Astronaut Group 8 was announced by NASA #OTD in 1978. This class of 35 astronauts included the first women, African Americans, and Asian American to travel into space for the US. Image: @NASA
26 Edwin Hubble submitted his paper A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae #OTD in 1929. It showed that extra-galactic nebulae were moving away from us with a velocity that increased linearly with distance. Image: Carnegie Observatories
27 The physicist Yoichiro Nambu (南部 陽一郎) was born #OTD in 1921. He developed a theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking to explain superconductivity, paving the way for electroweak symmetry breaking via the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model. Image: AIP Emilio Segre Archives
28 A comic strip titled Be Scientific with Ol' Doc Dabble appeared in the Los Angeles Times #OTD in 1934, quoting Fritz Zwicky's prediction of neutron stars, supernova, and the origin of cosmic rays. Image: Associated Press, @latimes
29 Dolly Parton was born #OTD IN 1946. Primarily known as an entertainer, her Imagination Library program has distributed over 100 million free books to kids around the world. Parton has probably done more than any living person to advance childhood literacy.
30 Buzz Aldrin, pilot of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module and the second person to set foot on the Moon, was born #OTD in 1930.
31 Léon Rosenfeld told the Princeton Physics Journal Club about his work with Bohr on fission, after Meitner & Frisch's discovery but before its publication. Bohr immediately wrote a letter to Nature #OTD in 1939, asserting the priority of Meitner & Frisch.
32 Felix Klein lectured “On Hilbert’s first note on the foundations of physics at the Mathematical Society of Göttingen #OTD in 1918. He included excerpts from letters in which he and Hilbert give priority to Emmy Noether’s results on conservation of energy in general relativity.
33 Lev Davidovich Landau, perhaps the most influential Soviet theoretical physicist of the 20th century, was born #OTD in 1908. He made foundational contributions to superfluidity, superconductivity, plasma physics, phase transitions, and quantum electrodynamics. Image: D. Gai, 1934
34 A little thread on Emmy Noether and giving credit. Felix Klein gave a lecture at the Mathematical Society of Göttingen #OTD in 1918. He included excerpts from letters in which he and Hilbert give priority to Emmy Noether’s results on conservation of energy in general relativity.
35 Gertrude B. Elion, who developed pharmaceuticals by focusing on differences in the biochemistry of healthy human cells and pathogens, co-winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine, was born #OTD in 1918. Image: GlaxoSmithKline Heritage Center
36 The physicist Hideki Yukawa was born #OTD in 1907. In 1934 he predicted the existence of a boson with a mass approximately 200 times that of the electron, based on the range of the strong nuclear force between protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Image: The Asahi Shimbun
37 A total solar eclipse passed over Long Island and part of New York City #OTD in 1925. Astronomers recorded the event from the US Navy dirigible Los Angeles, positioned near Montauk Point. Video: US Navy footage,
38 The Swedish mathematician Niels Fabian Helge von Koch was born #OTD in 1870. He discovered the Koch Snowflake, one of the first examples of a fractal curve.
39 Joseph Louis Lagrange, who developed the calculus of variations and used it to reformulate all of mechanics, and made foundational contributions to group theory and other areas of mathematics, was born #OTD in 1736. Image: The Wellcome Collection
40 A thread I wrote last year about the physicist Polykarp Kusch, who was born #OTD in 1911. He measured the magnetic moment of the electron and found a small deviation from the expected value, which is explained by Quantum Electrodynamics.
41 The Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics convened #OTD in 1938. The topic was supposed to be low-temperature physics. But Gamow opened the meeting by introducing Bohr, who announced Hahn & Strassmann's discovery and Meitner & Frisch's explanation of nuclear fission.
42 Einstein gave his Geometry and Experience lecture #OTD in 1921, for the Prussian Academy of Science's Leibniz Day. He proposed that the question of whether the Universe is spatially finite might be answered via *measurement*. Photo: Ferdinand Schmutzer/Musée Historique de Berne
43 Physicist Kathleen Yardley Lonsdale was born #OTD in 1907. She pioneered the used of X-ray diffraction to study the structure of crystals; one of her earliest results showed that Benzene's ring structure is flat. Image: University of Kent
44 The physicist Abdus Salam was born #OTD in 1926. He proposed the electroweak theory that unifies the electromagnetic & weak interactions, and did foundational work on grand unified theories that incorporate the strong interaction in a similar framework. Image: ICTP Photo Library
45 Isaac Newton was made aware of Jean Bernoulli's brachistochrone problem #OTD in 1697. He solved it later that evening, showing that the curve of fastest descent between two points was given by a portion of a cycloid.
46 Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson stole Rosalind Franklin's data #OTD in 1953 when Wilkins, without Franklin's permission, shared her photograph 51 with Watson. The Crick and Watson double helix paper was published in Nature about three months later.
47 Engineer and inventor Douglas Engelbart was born #OTD in 1925. His team at SRI developed or contributed to the computer mouse, hypertext, networked computers, and graphical interfaces, all of which were presented at the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968. Image: ARC Bootstrapper
48 HAM the chimpanzee became the first hominid in space #OTD in 1961, launched on a sub-orbital flight aboard Mercury-Redstone 2. His name was an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center and a nod to its commanding officer Lt Col Hamilton Blackshear. Image: NASA (Photo AA-984)
49 Anyway, Ham the space chimp did great on his mission! His short sub-orbital mission paved the way for Alan Shepard’s flight aboard Freedom 7 about three months later. Here's a photo of someone giving Ham an apple after he was pulled from the Atlantic #OTD in 1961. Source: NASA
50 Albert Einstein submitted his paper “Über Gravitationswellen” #OTD in 1918. On Gravitational Waves corrects an important mistake in his 1916 paper and gives the correct description of gravitational waves in general relativity.

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