"Why would you want to climb Mount Everest?" George Mallory was asked this question in 1924 and gave the most obvious answer: "Because it's there". The famous mountaineer was born 126 years ago, and best known for his expeditions to the highest mountain on earth.
207 years ago, the German poet, philosopher, and historian Friedrich Schiller passed away. As a representative of the Weimar Classicism and the 'Sturm und Drang' (Storm and Drive) movement, Schiller published some of the most influential works of the time.
On October 8-9, 2012 we were glad to attend the tele-TASK Symposium at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam. It was the 6th event of the series, where practitioners and researchers came together to discuss innovative technologies and methodologies for online learning.
Today for us it's pretty normal that electricity can be transmitted on a wire, because it's part of our daily life. But, in the early 18th century, when the English nature-scientist Stephen Gray was able to show that electricity really can be transmitted on a string of copper, it was an unheard-of revelation.
On the 7th of June in the year of our Lord 1742, Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach wrote a letter to his famous colleague Leonard Euler, which should make history. Well, at least in the mathematical world. In this letter Christian Goldbach refined an already previously stated conjecture from number theory concerning primes to his friend Euler, which by today is known as the famous Goldbach conjecture.
394 years ago, famous astronomer Johannes Kepler discovered the 3rd and also last of his planetary laws, and concluded the general revolution of our celestial world that started with Nikolaus Kopernikus about 100 years earlier. And that made him rather popular as he still is today. Did you know that there is a Kepler crater on the Moon, a Kepler crater on Mars, a Kepler asteroid, a Kepler supernova, of course there has to be a space mission named after him, even an opera
If you are going to Barcelona, Spain, it is rather unlikely that you will leave without having visited one of the fascinating architectural creations of famous architect and designer Antoni Gaudí, the frontfigure of the so-called Catalan Modernism (Modernista), who was born 160 years ago today. Architecture, nature, religion, and the love to his home country Catalonia were the driving forces of Gaudí's work. His work transcended mainstream Modernisme, culminating in an organic style inspired by nature.
The BBC’s website for the 2010 World Cup was notable for the raw amount of rich information that it contained. Every player on every team in every group had their own web page, and the ease with which you could navigate from one piece of content to the next was remarkable. Within the Semantic Web community, the website was notable for one more reason: it was made possible by the BBC’s embrace of Semantic Web technologies.. Topic: Information Management
61 years ago today, on June 14th 1951 the very first electronic computer produced in series (and in the United States), the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the US States Census Bureau at the price of $1.6 Mio. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC.
As you might know for sure, Benjamin Franklin wasn't only an enthusiastic scientist, inventor, and author, but also one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His roots lay back in Boston, where he was born in 1706 as the son of a chandler. Therefore the family could not afford the adequate education for their 17 children....
Rezension zu Liv Winterbergs Roman über das Leben der Jeanne Baré, die als Mann verkleidet an Entdeckungsfahrten in die Südsee teilnahm und als Wissenschaftlerin wertvolle Beiträge zur Botanik leistete....via Biblionomicon
Today, 32 years ago, the world's most famous puzzle started to spread all over the world, infecting the population with addiction and curiosity about its solving.
Bram Stoker in 1897 published his seminal book 'Dracula' in London and established one of the most influential genres in fantastic literature by introducing the Transylvanian blood sucker. Nowadays most people don't know that identifying Dracula with the historical Vlad Tepes -- called the impaler -- was completely made up by Stoker himself.
On May 24th 1844 the very first Morse telegram went over the line. Samuel Morse and his colleague Alfred Vail knew that the very first phrase to be sent with the new telecommunication medium was to be remembered. So what should they transmit? Morse came up with a quote from the bible, certainly well chosen for an historic occasion like this:
"What God had wrought"
sent by Morse in Washington to Alfred Vail at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "outer depot" in Baltimore.
I guess almost nobody except a few mathematicians and computer scientists have ever heard of the Australian computer scientist Charles Leonard Hamblin, who passed away 27 years ago today. And also most of my fellow computer scientists might not have heard of him. But, one of his major contributions to computer science was the introduction of the so-called Reverse Polish Notation. Does that ring a bell?
On this day in 1908, the 'Phyletic Museum' was giftet to the University of Jena due to its 350th anniversary by Ernst Haeckel. The famous zoologist was best known for his approaches in evolution theory.
Sir Fred Hoyle, born in 1915 was a famous astronomer, mathematician, and author. The scientist was the first to coin the term "Big Bang" for the now prevailing theory of the early development of the universe in 1949, even though he happened to be a strong opponent of this theory.
H. Yang, B. Quehl, and H. Sack. Proc. of 13th Int. Workshop on Image Analysis and Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS 2012), May 23-25, 2012, Dublin (Ireland), (2012)
T. Heath, R. Singer, N. Shabir, C. Clarke, and J. Leavesley. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Learning and Education with the Web of Data (LiLe-2012 at WWW-2012) Lyon, France, April 17, 2012., (2012)
M. Knuth, J. Hercher, and H. Sack. Proc. of. 2nd Int. Workshop on Usage Analysis and the Web of Data (USEWOD 2012), co-located with the 21st International World Wide Web Conference 2012 (WWW 2012), April 17, 2012, Lyon (France), (2012)
J. Hercher, M. Ruhl, and H. Sack. Proc. of 2nd DGI Conference, 64th Annual DGI Meeting -- Social Media and Web Science -- Das Web als Lebensraum, page 251--262. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Informationswissenschaft und Informationspraxis e.V., Frankfurt a. M., (2012)
H. Yang, B. Quehl, and H. Sack. Proc. of the 19th International Conference on Systems, Signals and Image Processing (IWSSIP 2012), April 11-13, 2012, Vienna (Austria), page 9--12. (2012)
J. Osterhoff, J. Waitelonis, and H. Sack. Proc. of 2. Workshop Interaktion und Visualisierung im Daten-Web (IVDW 2012), im Rahmen der INFORMATIK 2012, Braunschweig, (2012)