Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty, and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art.
On August 21, 1911 during intensive repair and renovation work the Louvre Museum realized that Leonardo Da Vinci's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was stolen.
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.
In 1888 Bertha Benz, wife of the German engineer and inventor Karl Benz, borrowed the newly invented car of her husband without his knowledge and undertook the very first journey in an automobile together with her two sons from Mannheim to Pforzheim over 106 km.
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.
In 1877 Thomas A. Edison conceived the first idea for his phonograph, the very first mechanical tool for recording and reproducing (replaying) sound. The phonograph also was the invention that first gained him public notice.
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.
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.
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.
Besides in science fiction, Herbert George Wells was a prolific writer in many other genres including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games. Together with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, Wells has been referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction".
On August 8, 1900 German mathematician David Hilbert gave a speech at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, at the Sorbonne, where he presented 10 mathematical Problems (out of a list of 23) all unsolved at the time, and several of them were very influential for 20th century mathematics.
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