^
Births
which occurred on a 06 October:
2002 AngelBourse
opens on the Internet. Based in Bristol, UK, its aim is to supplement the
funds “angels” (venture capitalists) provide to tiny companies
(market capitalization of less than £14 million) by making a market
for those who want to risk at least £1000 in such companies. Thus
it competes with the lower reaches of the London Stock Exchange's Alternative
Investment Market (AIM). Initially AngelBourse lists
26 companies, not by name (for surfers who are not certified as either
Sophisticated Investors or High Net Worth Individuals with an account costing
£33 per month) but by code. However, after completing an application,
giving my name as “Anonymous Guest” (without paying anything)
I saw these listed
[I added the links]: AJC Trailers — BCD
Modelling — Calibrand
— Carefree.TV
— Click Recruitment Systems — Lookbeyond
— Netvoyager
— Radtables — Rostima
— SocietyPersonnel.com
— The Creative Educational Corporation — The Prestfold Group —
Worldwide Environmental Technologies
^
1942 Xerography is patented
Chester Floyd Carlson [08 Feb 1906 – 19 Sep 1968] obtains a
patent on the xerography process for making electrostatic copies.
Carlson worked in the patent department of an electronics firm and
was frustrated at the difficulty of making copies of patent drawings.
He investigated various processes and developed xerography after four
years of experimenting. He made the first Xerox copy on 22 October
1938. Although he received a patent in 1942, he failed to interest
companies in producing copy machines until 1947, when the Haloid Company
of Rochester, New York, licensed the process. The company, which later
changed its name to Xerox, introduced its first copy machine in 1958.
|
1936 Robert
Phelan
Langlands,
Canadian mathematician. In January 1967 he made "the Langlands conjectures"
relating number theory, automorphic forms, and representation theory.
^
1931 Riccardo Giacconi, US
physical chemist who received one half of the 2002 Nobel Prize in
Physics “for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have
led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources”. The other half was
awarded jointly to Raymond
Davis Jr (USA) [14 Oct 1914~],
and Masatoshi Koshiba (Japan) [19 Sep 1926~]
In
2002 Giacconi wrote this autobiographical note:
I was born in Genoa, Italy, but I spent most of my life until 1956
in Milano. I was the only child. My mother, Elsa Canni Giacconi, was
a teacher of Mathematics and Physics at the high school level. She
was the co-author of many textbooks on geometry which were widely
adopted in Italy. She held that God made geometry. My father, Antonio
Giacconi, owned a small business. He had a knack of seeing historical
developments clearly and to perceive when the King was naked. He was
an anti-fascist and suffered for it. My mother and father were legally
separated when I was eight years old.
I experienced World War II as a young
teenager. I was sent to live with my aunts, Giulia and Elisa Canni,
in Cremona following the 1942 bombings of Milano. The son of Giulia,
Giovanni Benini, of my same age, became the only brother I ever had.
I had access to a large library, including classics, and I read copiously.
I returned to Milano in 1944 and lived
there through 1956. My schooling was not completely conventional.
I went to a German kindergarten, then first year elementary school
in a Military College, then third year in Genoa, then again third
year in Milano. I cut school frequently in Genoa and I was a discipline
problem in Milano. I had my best learning in Cremona. I jumped last
year of high school directly to the University of Milano. I obtained
the doctorate in Physics in four years. Outside of school I loved
climbing, hiking, and skiing. I traveled throughout Europe and I enlisted
for two weeks as a trimmer on an English trawler out of Grimsby.
II. Education
Up to and including university my interaction with the educational
system was always difficult. In high school I loved to point out the
mistakes by our mathematics teachers. At the university, I had difficulties
following the heavy burden of lectures although I was able to pass
all tests with relatively high grades. My salvation was to start doing
research in the very first year of university. At the University of
Milano there was at the time an active group of cosmic ray researchers
interested in studying muons, lambda particles, and proton interactions.
A very kind and bright young professor, Antonio Mura, put me to work
doing literature searches and summaries, while Carlo Succi put me
in the laboratory building power supplies with surplus U.S. parts
and building and operating cloud chambers.
This training was in stark contrast
to the pedantic approach of many of the older teachers. The lectures
in physics, chemistry, physical chemistry, and theory were of little
use to me. I still loved geometry, analysis, and physics as I saw
it from a researcher's point of view.
I did my thesis work on the development
of nuclear interactions by protons in the lead plates of a cloud chamber
at the laboratory of Testa Grigia (3500 m). It took me two years to
collect 80 proton interactions. I prepared a modest thesis confirming
Fermi's model and I was finally out of formal schooling. I was hired
as an assistant professor in the Physics Department and just before
this time I met Giuseppe Occhialini. He was an extraordinary figure
in Milano. His work was at an extremely high level and widely recognized
internationally.
To my knowledge he never gave a lecture.
He took a liking to me and I to him. I was able to follow his multiplexed
way of thinking and talking, and I was able to moderate some of his
flights of imagination by sober use of first principles. He approved
of my choice of working with cloud chambers, though most of the young
people worked with emulsions, with the remark that at least I would
learn plumbing. He suggested I go the United States to work with R.W.
Thompson for whom he and I had the most profound esteem. I obtained
a Fulbright Fellowship and sailed for the U.S. in 1956 and have lived
here until now, except for a seven-year period (1992-1999) in Munich.
 III.
Fellowships
I spent 1956 to 1958 in Bloomington, Indiana, working on the analysis
of data previously obtained by Thompson and on the construction of
a new and bigger cloud chamber for cosmic ray research. Thompson was
a painstaking experimentalist as well as brilliant in data analysis
and theory. He was the closest in the U.S. to the ideal of the Italian
school of physics as embodied by Fermi, who was both a great experimentalist
and theoretical thinker. Thompson had committed a blunder in research
when young and this fact haunted him for the rest of his life. He
never received the recognition he deserved for his discovery of the
qo mass and this troubled him greatly.
It became quickly apparent that Thompson's
group was not the place for me. The search for the anti-lambda particle
was unsuccessful and the new cloud chamber would take 10 years to
build. I moved to Princeton University in 1958 to work in G. Reynolds'
laboratory. There I conducted research in m mesons and carried out
an unsuccessful search for a new type of particle whose discovery
had been claimed by Russian scientists. This search was a collaboration
between Fred Hendel (a senior Austrian scientist), Herbert Gursky
(a post doc), and myself. We built equipment, worked like fiends,
analyzed data, and declared failure. In the meanwhile I had learned
a lot about scintillation counters and image intensifiers to be used
for elementary particle research at the then-envisaged Princeton-Penn
accelerator.
This put me in contact with the MIT
group led by Herbert Bridge. Also with American Science and Engineering
(AS&E), led by Martin Annis, an excosmic ray physicist. Both Bridge
and Annis had been students of Bruno Rossi of MIT, who was chairman
of the Board of AS&E.
My fellowship at Princeton expired
in 1959. I went to visit Occhialini at CERN. He seemed to be in one
of his emotional downturns seeing conspirators everywhere. CERN felt
like an impersonal huge machine and offered me no prospects. I was
therefore quite happy to receive an offer from AS&E to initiate
for the 28-man corporation a program of space sciences. I joined the
Corporation in September 1959 and I started a serious career in science.
IV. Outlook and personal considerations
Cosmic ray research as a tool to study elementary particles was ending
just as I was doing my thesis. The work by Thompson was destined to
a dead end. The MIT cosmic ray research group led by Rossi had decided
to abandon almost completely cosmic ray research and to start utilizing
space to study plasmas and gamma rays from celestial objects. In particular,
W. Kraushaar and George Clark carried out one of the first surveys
in gamma rays.
For me the problem was much more personal.
I felt I had not learned any useful skills while working in Milano,
Indiana, and Princeton. I desperately wanted some kind of permanent
position where I could learn a trade and, moreover, I felt I owed
this to my family. I had married Mirella, whom I had known in Milano
since the age of 16. Guia and Anna, our two daughters, needed stability
and a home. The influence of Mirella on my life has been greater than
that of any other person. She brought love, calm, and stability where
none had existed before. She created a home for us full of beauty
and tenderness. She is brighter than I am, translated many books for
the MIT press, and has an uncompromising view of reality. Through
thick and thin we are still together today.
V. Early years at AS&E
Given the task of creating a space program for the company, I started
discussions with George Clark, an MIT professor and consultant and
shareholder in AS&E. We discussed the possibility of searching
for the ratio between alpha particles and protons in the trapped radiation
belts just recently discovered by Van Allen. Another suggestion came
from Bruno Rossi at a party in his house. He reported discussions
at the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences about
the potential for x-ray astronomy and suggested AS&E might undertake
it. I have always been grateful for that initial suggestion.
1959 to 1962 were among the most productive
years of my life. I was involved in classified research: 19 rocket
payloads, six satellite payloads, one entire satellite, and an aircraft
payload, as well as four rocket payloads for geophysical research.
Also in this period I produced instruments for alpha - proton ratio
experiments, as well as the initial development of the x-ray telescope
and the first few flights of rocket payloads for x-ray astronomy.
This was a tremendous challenge. My group at AS&E went from 3
people (myself and two technicians) to 70 people in two and a half
years. Frank Paolini and Herbert Gursky joined the group. Frank was
a great instrumentalist. Without his contributions the successful
1962 x-ray payload could not have happened. Herbert Gursky, though
quite valiant in the laboratory and in the field (he actually launched
the June 12, 1962, rocket), was always more of a natural scientist.
The fundamental steps in the dawn of x-ray astronomy remain in my
mind: the first brief review, theoretical and experimental, of x-ray
astronomy (1960), the invention of the x-ray telescope (1960), and
the 1963 plan for xray astronomy by Gursky and me. This plan laid
out a program of experiments which went from rockets to UHURU, "Einstein,"
and Chandra. We thought then it could be done in five years, but it
was not accomplished until the year 2000.
Much of the history of the development
of x-ray astronomy has been told by Richard Hirsh, by Wally Tucker
and me, and by others in books and articles and I will not repeat
it here. But my scientific life took an unexpected turn after 1980
and I will devote some space to my growing interest in the direction
of scientific enterprises outside of x-ray astronomy.
VI. Center for astrophysics
I had decided by 1973 that I actually loved astronomy, at least as
I was practicing it. The success of UHURU gave the members of my group
(Gorenstein, Gursky, Kellog, Murray, Schreier, Tananbaum, Tucker,
and Van Speybroeck) a feeling of awe and gratitude at the richness
and beauty of nature. We had won the NASA contract to build the Large
Orbiting X-Ray Observatory (1970-1973). The contract was canceled
due to cost overruns in the NASA Viking Program in 1973 and restarted
the same year for what became "Einstein," at one-half the
size. We felt that we wanted to operate "Einstein" as a
national observatory open to astronomers of all disciplines. AS&E
did not seem to be the right place to do this. Thus the move to Harvard
(where I was named a full professor) with eight of my group. We were
looking for a closer involvement with the rest of astronomy and we
thought the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) might provide the opportunity.
As it turned out, hardly anybody at
CfA cared about what we were doing and there was less support for
research than we had at AS&E. (In retrospect I have often wondered
if we could have been successful at all had we started our work at
Harvard). When I proposed to NASA an x-ray astronomy institute to
direct the construction and operation of the "Einstein"
successor in 1976 (then called AXAF and now Chandra), there was little
support from CfA itself, where the institute would have been located.
The proposal for AXAF was written by Harvey Tananbaum and me in 1976
and started the process which led to Chandra. Harvey was the project
scientist for UHURU, the scientific manager for "Einstein,"
and took on the leadership role in Chandra. His contributions to x-ray
astronomy have never been sufficiently recognized. It took perseverance
over almost 20 years to turn Chandra into reality. For me the delay
between conception and execution was becoming too long. Also, after
the glory of discoveries with UHURU, "Einstein" seemed relatively
tame. I was ready for a change, which came with the unsought offer
by Margaret Burbidge to become the first director of the Space Telescope
Science Institute (STScI).
VII. Hubble space telescope
The effort at CfA to make x-ray astronomy useful to astronomers of
all disciplines spurred us to provide the user with calibrated data
out of a software pipeline. The development of end-to-end data management
systems stems from that beginning. As the first Director of STScI,
I was able to transfer my methodology for doing science in the planning
and execution of science operations of Hubble.
Every aspect of the mission was examined
by myself and the distinguished staff we were able to attract to the
Institute. Ethan Schreier, my comrade of UHURU and "Einstein"
days, and Rodger Doxey brought the physics-oriented mentality of x-ray
astronomers to the new project.
Although we were quite ignorant in
optical astronomy, we quickly found that operational planning for
Hubble was a disaster. Guide stars could not be found on the fly as
planned, the telescope could not point to planets, simultaneous reception
of data from two instruments could not be achieved, and on and on.
Even more serious was the lack of tools
to schedule the complex operations of Hubble and the absence of a
data reduction system capable of ingesting the very high data rates.
Both were accomplished by STScI. This meant developing models for
the instrument defined by parameters measured on the ground and continuously
verified in orbit, determining modes of instrument operations, and
defining calibration routines. We also developed a software pipeline
capable of analyzing data in real time and constructed an archive
of calibrated data suitable for reuse by scientists other than those
who built the instruments or used the Hubble through the competitive
research program. We instituted, with NASA's consent, data analysis
grants and the Hubble Fellowship program. We developed an outstanding
outreach program to reach the general public as well as colleagues
and students.
We took responsibility for Hubble beyond
the construction of glass and metal to turn it into an outstanding
scientific tool.
It would be impossible to credit all
of the scientists involved in creating and running the STScI and to
name only a few seems unfair to the others. Many of them have continued
at the Institute until today and many have gone on to prestigious
positions at outstanding research institutions.
In 1991 my son Marc died in an automobile
accident. STScI, Hubble, and Baltimore were continued and painful
reminders of devastating grief. When the offer came to become Director
General of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Mirella and I
jumped at the opportunity.
VIII. ESO and the VLT
When I joined ESO in January 1993, ESO was beginning to execute the
Very Large Telescope (VLT) program. Quite a bit of progress had already
occurred but the program was of such a size as to equal eight times
the yearly budget of ESO and was 30 times larger than the previously
built New Technology Telescope.
Massimo Tarenghi, an excellent scientist
and an energetic manager, needed support from the rest of ESO to carry
the project through. To help him in his task we had to fully reorganize
ESO and introduce modern management techniques suitable for large
programs. This was reasonably straightforward. More difficult was
the introduction at ESO of the concept of a single observatory in
which quality rather than quantity mattered and the introduction of
end-toend software systems, calibration, and archiving, whose validity
was proven on Hubble but had not yet been used in ground-based optical
astronomy.
VLT became a machine to do science
in which efficiency of operations and ability to use the data were
as important as telescope and instrumentation performance.
Keck had the fortune of being the first
to provide a 10 meter class telescope and reaped the early reward.
But in a certain sense, it is operated as an old telescope for use
by a restricted community. The success of VLT has placed European
optical ground-based astronomy in the position to compete worldwide.
Toward the end of my stay at ESO we
initiated a new cooperative program with the United States and Canada
to build a large submillimeter and millimeter wave array of antennas
to be placed in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. At the expiration
of my tenure as Director General in 1999, I returned to the United
States where now, as President of Associated Universities, Inc., I
am working with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory as the Executive
for the North American portion of the project, called the Atacama
Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). The same principles and the same methods
used in "Einstein," Hubble, VLT, and Chandra are being utilized.
|
1930 Hafez al Assad, president-dictator of Syria, who died
on 10 June 2000 (full bio)
1927 The Jazz
Singer, a movie that featured both silent and sound-synchronized
scenes, opens, ushering in the era of talking pictures.
1925
Shana Alexander, author-journalist.
1918 Abraham
Robinson, Jewish-German-born US mathematician who died on 11
April 1974. Author of Complete theories (1956), Non-Standard
Analysis (1966). Robinson invented non-standard analysis, which gives
an alternative model for the Real numbers (sometimes called hyperreals)
in which infinitesimals (numbers > 0 but < 1/n for all n) can be interpreted
in a different way.
1914 Thor Heyerdahl Norway,
anthropologist/explorer (Kon Tiki, Aku-Aku)
1908 Sergei
Sobolev, Saint-Petersburg Russian mathematician who died on
03 January 1989. In the 1930s he introduced the Sobolev function spaces.
1898 Charles Lapicque, French artist who died in
1988. — more
1895 Caroline Gordon, writer (The Strange Children)
1974 Shneur Zalman Rubashev “Zalman Shazar”,
Israeli journalist, scholar, and politician who was the third president
of Israel (1963–1973) and died on 05 October 1974.
^
1888 Li Dazhao (Li Ta-chao), cofounder
of the Chinese Communist Party in May 1920 (not July 1921), with Chen
Duxiu [08 Oct 1879 – 27 May
1942] and others. Li was the mentor of Mao Tse-tung [26 Dec 1893 –
09 Sep 1976]. Li was hanged on 28 April 1927 by order of the Manchurian
warlord Chang Tso-lin.
After studying at Tientsin and at Waseda University in Tokyo, Li became
an editor for Hsin ch'ing-nien (“New Youth”),
the principal journal of the new Western-oriented literary and cultural
movements. In 1918 he was appointed chief librarian of Peking University,
and in 1920 he became, concurrently, professor of history. Inspired
by the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Li began to study
and lecture on Marxism, influencing many students who later became
important Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong (then an impoverished
student whom Li had employed as a library clerk).
When
the Marxist study groups that Li had created evolved into the formally
organized Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in May 1920, he was instrumental
in carrying out the policy dictated by the Communist International
and in effecting cooperation between the minuscule CCP and the national
leader Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). As a party leader,
Li's role was limited to North China. In 1927 he was seized at the
Soviet Embassy in Peking, where he had taken refuge, by the Manchurian
warlord Chang Tso-lin, who had him hanged.
A seminal Chinese Marxist thinker, Li was more party theoretician
than party leader. Like most of the Chinese Communists of his day,
he was intensely nationalistic before he embraced Marxism. Li was
unwilling to wait for the international proletarian revolution to
occur in the West and liberate China, and he was convinced that China's
small urban working class was unable to carry out the revolution by
itself. Because of these views he disregarded or played down the doctrine
of proletarian class struggle presented in Marxism–Leninism.
The Communist revolution, in Li's conception, became a populist revolution
against the exploitation and oppression of foreign imperialism, with
an overwhelming emphasis on the central role of China's impoverished
peasantry. In a country that was seething with national resentment
against foreign aggression, chafing at its own backwardness, and composed
chiefly of peasants, Li's ideas had decisive relevance and formed
the core of the thinking of Mao Zedong, who later formulated the military
strategy by which the peasantry could carry out its revolution. Li
came to be regarded as the most venerated of Chinese Communist martyrs. |
1887 Charles Edouard Jeanneret “Le Corbusier”,
Swiss French architect, urban planner, painter, lithographer, writer, designer,
and theorist, active mostly in France, who died on 27 August 1965. —
MORE
ON “LE CORBUSIER” AT ART “4” OCTOBER
with links to images.
1887 Martín Luis Guzmán
Mexico, novelist (The Eagle and the Serpent)
1773
Louis-Philippe, who (full
coverage) on 09 August 1830 became king of the French, and died
on 26 August 1850. (050828)
1862 Albert Jeremiah
Beveridge orator, progressive Republican US senator for Indiana
(1900-1912), and historian, who died on 27 April 1927. Author of The
Life of John Marshall (4 vol., 1916–1919) and of two volumes of a biography
of Abraham Lincoln (1928), unfinished at his death. .— {Perhaps he
ought to have invented a Beveridge beverage, but he didn't}
1853
Thomas George Shaughnessy, in Milwaukee, son of Irish immigrants.
He began working for the railway at the age of 16 out of Milwaukee and in
1882 joined the staff of the Canadian Pacific Railway as general purchasing
agent. In 1891 he was appointed its vice president, and from 1899 to 1923
he was either president or chairman and also director of all the allied
lines. His tenure corresponded with the greatest expansion in the railroad's
history, with shipping and other industries being added to the company's
enterprises. He died on 10 December 1923 in Montreal.
1849
Basileios Zacharias “Sir Basil Zaharoff”, in Turkey,
of Greek parents, international armaments dealer and financier. Reputedly
one of the richest men in the world, he was described as a “merchant of
death” and the “mystery man of Europe.” He died on 27 November 1936.
^
1847 Jane
Eyre, novel by Charlotte
Brontë, is published in London
Jane
Eyre is published by Smith, Elder and Co. Charlotte Brontë
[21 Apr 1816 – 31 Mar 1855] , the book's author, used the pseudonym
Currer Bell. The book was an immediate popular success. Brontë was
born in 1816, one of six siblings who grew up in a gloomy parsonage
in the remote English village of Hawthorne. Her mother died when she
was 5, and Charlotte, her two older sisters, and her younger sister
Emily Brontë [30 July 1818 – 19 Dec 1848], were sent to Clergy
Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. The cheap school
featured bad food, cold rooms, and harsh discipline, all reflected
in the image of the boarding school portrayed in Jane Eyre.
Charlotte's two oldest sisters died of illnesses while at school.
After their sisters' deaths, Charlotte
and Emily were brought home, where they and their remaining siblings,
Anne
Brontë [17 Jan 1820 – 28 May 1849] and Branwell, amused
themselves by making up elaborate stories about fantastical worlds.
From 1835 to 1838, Charlotte taught in a girls' school. Meanwhile,
she and Emily formed a plan to open their own school, and in 1842
the sisters went to Brussels to study languages and school administration.
In Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with the married headmaster, an
experience she used as the basis for her last novel, Villette
(1853).
Returning to the parsonage at Hawthorne,
the sisters tried to open their own school but could not attract students.
Meanwhile, their adored brother Branwell had become a heavy drinker
and opium user. When Emily got him a job teaching with her at a wealthy
manor, he lost both their positions after a tryst with the mother
of the house. In 1846, Charlotte accidentally found some poems written
by Emily and discovered that all three sisters had secretly been writing
verse. They published at their own expense their own book, Poems
by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, adopting a pseudonym because
they believed women writers were judged too softly. Only two copies
sold, but publishers became interested in the sisters' work. Charlotte's
Jane
Eyre was published in 1847 under the name Currer Bell. Emily's
Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were published
later that year. Sadly, all three of Charlotte's siblings died within
the next two years. Left alone, Charlotte cared for her ill father
and married curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854. Charlotte died during
pregnancy shortly after the marriage.
Written under the pseudonym Currer
Bell, the novel Jane
Eyre presents the
struggles of an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess.
She is a thinking, feeling woman, craving for love but able to renounce
it at the call of impassioned self-respect and moral conviction. The
book's narrator and main character, Jane Eyre, is an orphan and is
governess to the ward of Mr. Rochester, the Byronic and enigmatic
employer with whom she falls in love. Her love is reciprocated, but
on the wedding morning it comes out that Rochester is already married
and keeps his mad and depraved wife in the attics of his mansion.
Jane leaves him, suffers hardship,
and finds work as a village schoolmistress. When Jane learns, however,
that Rochester has been maimed and blinded while trying vainly to
rescue his wife from the burning house that she herself had set afire,
Jane seeks him out and marries him.
There are melodramatic naïvetés in the story, and Charlotte's elevated
rhetorical passages do not much appeal to modern taste, but she maintains
her hold on the reader. The novel is subtitled An Autobiography
and is written in the first person; but the autobiography is not Charlotte's.
Personal experience is fused with suggestions from widely different
sources, and the Cinderella theme may well come from Samuel Richardson's
Pamela. The action is carefully motivated, and apparently
episodic sections are seen to be necessary to the full expression
of Jane's character and the working out of the threefold moral theme
of love, independence, and forgiveness.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË ONLINE: BRONTE ONLINE: |
| Jane
Eyre
Jane
Eyre (2rd site)
Jane
Eyre (3rd site)
Jane
Eyre (zipped PDF)
Poems
by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (i.e.the 3 Brontë sisters)
Poems
(same, another site) |
The
Professor
The
Professor (another site)
The
Professor (zipped PDF)
Shirley
Shirley
(another site)
Villette |
1846 George Westinghouse prolific inventor, held over 100
patents on creations including air brakes for trains, responsible for alternating
current in US; founder of Westinghouse Electric Company. He died on 12 March
1914.
1831 Julius
Wilhelm Richard
Dedekind, Braunschweig German mathematician who died on 12
February 1916. His major contribution was a redefinition of irrational numbers
in terms of Dedekind cuts. He introduced the notion of an ideal which is
fundamental to ring theory. Author of Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie
(1863), Stetigkeit
und Irrationale Zahlen (1872), Über die Theorie der ganzen
algebraischen Zahlen (1879).
1823 George Henry Boker,
author. – BOKER ONLINE: Anne
Boleyn: A Tragedy, The
Book of the Dead
1811 Eulalie-Mélanie Durocher, who
would become Blessed Marie Rose Durocher and die on
her 38th birthday.
1784 Pierre
Charles
François Dupin,
French mathematician who died on 18 January 1873. He made contributions
to differential geometry and in particular invented the Dupin Indicatrix.
1771 (or some time in December 1771?) Jacques Nicolas Paillot
de Montabert, French artist who died on 06 May 1849.
1767
Henry Christophe, Haitian independence leader who died on 08
October 1820 [full bio]. An official document issued on his
own order gives this birth date and its place as Grenada, but this may or
may not be true.
1745 Francissek Smuglevitch, Polish
artist who died on 18 September 1807
1744 James McGill,
in Glasgow, Scotland. He emigrated from Scotland to Canada, where he became
involved in the fur trade. About 1774 he made his headquarters at Montreal
and soon became an important figure in the fur trade. McGill represented
the west ward of Montreal in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada (now
in Quebec) in 1792–1796 and 1800–1804; in 1793 he was appointed a member
of the Executive Council of the province. During the War of 1812 between
the United States and Great Britain, he was an honorary colonel of the Montreal
Infantry Volunteer Regiment. He bequeathed much of his estate to the founding
of McGill University in Montreal, where he died on 19 December 1813.
1578 Hieronymus Kessel, Flemish artist who died in 1636.
— more
1552 Matteo
Ricci,
an Italian Jesuit who was sent as a missionary to China in 1583 and co-founded
the first successful Catholic missions there. His complete adoption of Chinese
customs raised the issue of the limits of "accommodation" to other cultures,
in the preaching of the gospel. He was also a mathematician.
He died on 11 May 1610.
1536 Santi di Tito, Italian painter who died on 24 July
1603. — more
|
^
On
a 06 October: 
