On April 30, 1777, German mathematician and physical scientist Carl Friedrich Gauß was born. He who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, algebra, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics. He is often referred to as Princeps mathematicorum (Latin, "the Prince of Mathematicians") as well as "greatest mathematician since antiquity".
Paul Watzlawick was an Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher. A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he has commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.
On September 17, 1991, the Finnish student of computer science Linus Torwalds uploaded Linux kernel version 0.01 of his later to become famous operating system Linux to the ftp server ftp.funet.fi and made it publicly available.
On October 17, 1604, the famous German astronomer Johannes Kepler started his observations of the 1604 supernova, named after him as Kepler's Supernova or Kepler's Star.
On November 30, 1835, famous American author Samuel Longhorn Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was born in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri. He is most noted for his humorous novels about the mischievous boys Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and their adventures on the mighty Mississippi River.
On March 19, 1821, Sir Richard Francis Burton, British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat, was born. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia, Africa and the Americas, as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures, among them also his journey together with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile.
On April 1, 1976, the original Apple Computer, also known retroactively as the Apple I was demonstrated for the first time in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California. The Apple I was a personal computer released by the Apple Computer Company designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Actually it was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs, who had the idea of selling the computer. Thus, the Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Jobs sold his only means of transportation, a VW Microbus and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500.
On April 17, 1761, English mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes passed away. He is best known as name giver of the Bayes' theorem, of which he had developed a special case. T expresses (in the Bayesian interpretation) how a subjective degree of belief should rationally change to account for evidence, and finds application in in fields including science, engineering, economics (particularly microeconomics), game theory, medicine and law.
On April 20, 1534, French explorer of Breton origin Jacques Cartier set sail under a commission from the king, hoping to discover a western passage to the wealthy markets of Asia to discover Canada and Labrador. Actually, Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named "The Country of Canadas", after the Iroquois names for the two big settlements he saw at Stadacona (now Quebec City) and at Hochelaga (now Montreal Island).
Author J.K. Rowling became an international literary sensation when the first three installments of her Harry Potter children's book series took over the top three slots of The New York Times best-seller list.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the finest composers the world has ever known, had two great loves in his life: the first was music; and the second was Constanze Weber, whom he married in Vienna on August 4, 1782.
Today 16 years ago, one of the most important engineers of the 20th century passed away. Frank Whittle was well known for inventing the Jet engine that he developed independently and at the same time as German engineer Hans von Ohain.
The atomic number uniquely identifies a chemical element. This discovery is thanked to the British physicist Henry Moseley, who justified this empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number also from physical laws.
Most people know American author Herman Melville only by his most famous novel, the story of Captain Ahab and his paranoid hunt for the white whale Moby Dick, but Herman Melville was a productive writer as well as an intrepid world traveller.
Jakob Bernoulli, born in 1654, is best known for his work Ars Conjectandi (The Art of Conjecture), where he described the known results in probability theory and in enumeration, including the application of probability theory to games of chance.
The character of Shakespeare's MacBeth is based on the historic Mac Bethad mac Findlaich, Mormaer of Moray, an 11th century Scottish nobleman, who commited regicide to become Kink of Scottland.
On this day in 1948, the New York Herald published the news that gold has been found in California causing thousands of people to try their luck and seek for gold.