MacTutor
Mathematicians Of The Day
24th February
On this day in 1987, a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud occurred visible to the naked eye. It was the closest observed supernova since Kepler's Supernova in 1604, which occurred in the Milky Way itself.
Click on Ⓟ for a poster.
Born:
- 1868: James Craig
- 1878: Felix Bernstein Ⓟ
- 1909: Max Black Ⓟ
- 1918: Geoffrey Kneebone Ⓟ
- 1920: Sree Pillai Ⓟ
- 1921: Marília Peixoto Ⓟ
- 1932: Siobhán Vernon Ⓟ
- 1946: Gregori Margulis Ⓟ
Died:
- 1728: Charles René Reyneau
- 1812: Étienne Louis Malus Ⓟ
- 1844: Antoine-André-Louis Reynaud
- 1856: Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Ⓟ
- 1871: Julius Weisbach Ⓟ
- 1929: Mauritz Dahlin Ⓟ
- 1933: Eugenio Bertini Ⓟ
- 1954: Fabio Conforto Ⓟ
- 1974: Glenny Smeal
- 2001: Claude E Shannon Ⓟ
- 2020: Katherine Johnson Ⓟ
Quotation of the day
From Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky
In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet make no advance from that state in which it came to us from Euclid.
As belonging to these imperfections, I consider the obscurity in the fundamental concepts of the geometrical magnitudes and in the manner and method of representing the measuring of these magnitudes, and finally the momentous gap in the theory of parallels, to fill which all efforts of mathematicians have so far been in vain.
