MacTutor
Mathematicians Of The Day
3rd December
On this day in 1638, Edmund Halley became a graduate of the University of Oxford without taking the degree examinations, the degree being conferred on the command of King Charles II.
Click on Ⓟ for a poster.
Born:
- 1901: Levan Gokieli Ⓟ
- 1903: Sydney Goldstein Ⓟ
- 1924: John Backus Ⓟ
- 1933: Dorothy Foster Ⓟ
- 1936: Jerome Keisler Ⓟ
- 1939: Mario Wschebor Ⓟ
- 1967: Marie Françoise Ouedraogo Ⓟ
Died:
- 1945: James Watt
- 1956: Felix Bernstein Ⓟ
- 1983: Elliott Montroll Ⓟ
- 1984: Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin Ⓟ
- 1995: Catherine Steele Ⓟ
- 2004: Shiing-shen Chern Ⓟ
- 2010: Cora Sadosky Ⓟ
- 2016: Donald Pack Ⓟ
- 2023: Sigurður Helgason Ⓟ
Quotation of the day
From John Backus
Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 [an early computer], writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.
