On May 21, 1471, German painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist Albrecht Dürer was born. He was considered as one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance.
On October 12, 1875, English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, and mountaineer Aleister Crowley was born. During his lifetime, Crowley gained widespread notoriety.
On July 29, 1805, French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was born. He is best known for his Democracy in America, where he analyzed the rising living standards and social conditions of individuals and their relationship to the market and state in Western societies.
On August 26, 1795, Italian physician, occultist and adventurer Giuseppe Balsamo aka Count Alessandro di Cagliostro passed away. The history and stories around Cagliostro are shrouded in rumour, propaganda, and mysticism. Some effort was expended to ascertain his true identity when he was arrested because of possible participation in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
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.
Screen scraping is the art of programatically extracting data from websites. If you think it's useful: it is. If you think it's difficult: it isn't. And if you think it's easy to really piss off administrators with ill-considered scripts, you're damn right.
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
On July 9, 1764, English author and pioneer of Gothic novel Ann Radcliffe was born. You might have never heard of Ann Radcliffe, if you are not familiar with English literature, but her prose strongly influenced a literature style called 'Gothic novel', where the supernatural comes into play and all of today's vampire, horror, and fantastic literature has originated from.
On June 19, 2002, American businessman, and a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer Steve Fossett launched the 10-story high balloon Spirit of Freedom from Northam, Western Australia, for a journey around the world.
On May 2nd, 1601 (or 1602), German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was born. He has published most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology, and medicine, and has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci for his enormous range of interests. He is regarded as one of the founders of Egyptology for his (mostly fruitless) efforts in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, wrote an encyclopedia about China, studied volcanos and fossils, was one of the very first to observe microbes thorough a microscope, and experimented with the laterna magica as a predecessor of photography.
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.
On August 21, 1789, French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy was born. He is considered one of the greatest mathematicians during the nineteenth century. There are 16 concepts and theorems named for Cauchy, more than for any other mathematician. Cauchy was one of the most prolific mathematicians of all times. Cauchy wrote 789 papers, a quantity exceeded only by Euler and Cayley, which brought precision and rigor to mathematics.
On September 23, 63 BC, Gaius Octavius aka Imperator Caesar Divi F. Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire and first Emperor was born. The Roman Empire as a follow up of the former Roman Republic existed for almost four centuries, before it was divided up into Western and Eastern Roman Empire. While the western port deceased to exist in the 5th century AD, the eastern part continued to prosper for almost a millenium until the Ottoman invasion in the 15th century.
On June 27, 1806, British mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan was born. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, a method of mathematical proof typically used to establish a given statement for all natural numbers.
On April 16, 1811, Wilhelmine Reichard launched to her first solo flight in a gas balloon, thus becoming Germany`s very first female balloonist. You might remember that in 1783 the brothers Montgolfier already launched the very first balloon, as we reported in our recent blog post 'More than just Hot Air...'. Actually, the first passengers were a sheep, a rooster, and a duck that were given the honor to take part in the first flight with living creatures on board.
On June 15, 1475, Pope Sixtus IV issued the papal bull 'Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae' in which he regulated the complex structure of the newly founded Vatican Apostolic Library and appointed Renaissance author Bartolomeo Platina as its first head librarian.