MacTutor
Mathematicians Of The Day
31st March
On this day in 1952, Alan Turing was tried as a homosexual, offering no defence other than that he saw nothing wrong in his actions. Found guilty, he was given the alternatives of prison or oestrogen injections for a year. He accepted the latter and returned to a wide range of academic pursuits.
Click on Ⓟ for a poster.
Born:
- 1596: René Descartes Ⓟ
- 1730: Étienne Bézout Ⓟ
- 1795: Louis Richard
- 1800: Stephen de Gurbs
- 1806: Thomas Kirkman Ⓟ
- 1848: Diederik Korteweg Ⓟ
- 1884: Nicolae Abramescu Ⓟ
- 1917: Beno Eckmann Ⓟ
- 1920: Frank Bonsall Ⓟ
- 1921: Martin Löb Ⓟ
Died:
- 1624: João Baptista Lavanha
- 1727: Isaac Newton Ⓟ
- 1877: Augustin Cournot Ⓟ
- 1920: Paul Bachmann Ⓟ
- 1964: William Gentle Ⓟ
- 1971: William Youden Ⓟ
- 1991: Linards Reiziņš Ⓟ
- 1997: Lyman Spitzer Ⓟ
- 2001: Geoffrey Walker Ⓟ
- 2003: Donald Coxeter Ⓟ
Quotation of the day
From René Descartes
I concluded that I might take as a general rule the principle that all things which we very clearly and obviously conceive are true: only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.
