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#OTD in 1843.

William Rowan Hamilton invents quaternions, a 3D system of complex numbers.

Important precursors to this work included Euler's four-square identity (1748) & Olinde Rodrigues' parameterization of general rotations by 4 parameters (1840), but neither of these writers treated the four-parameter rotations as an algebra. Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered quaternions in 1819, but this work was not published until 1900.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaterni…

gutenberg.org/ebooks/9942

#mathematics

Portrait of Sir William Rowan Hamilton. In the image, Hamilton is shown as a mature man with a thoughtful, introspective demeanor. His face is marked by high cheekbones, a prominent brow, and deep-set eyes that reflect intellectual depth. His hair, typically dark and wavy, is styled neatly, though in some versions of his portraits it appears slightly receding, signaling the passage of time. His expression is serious, with a slight furrow in his brow, indicative of his deep intellectual pursuits.

Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century by Macfarlane

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.
Project Gutenberg
#Mathematics #otd

#OtD 3 Sep 1945 President Harry Truman approved and expanded Operation Paperclip, a secret plan to bring over 1500 Nazi scientists and war criminals to live in the US where they worked on the space program as well as biological and chemical weapons stories.workingclasshistory.co…
#otd

112 years ago today #OTD
A picture of a newspaper reading: THE RODNEY AND OTAMATEA TiMES, WEDNESDAY. AUGUST 14 1912 Science Notes and News. COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECT- ING CLIMATE. The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
#otd

Humans first set foot on the Moon #OTD in 1969.
Color photo of the Apollo 11 Command and Service Module, taken from from the Landing Module, after undocking. The top of the module is a silver cone, seen nearly head on, attached to a white cylinder. The lunar surface – a yellowish gray, with craters – is in the background.
Color photo of an astronaut descending the ladder from the LM. He is wearing a puffy white suit with a large, rectangular backpack. Parts of the LM are covered in a copper-colored foil.
Color photo of the astronaut standing in front of the LM. The lunar surface appears gray and dusty. There is lens flare from the sun just out of the frame of the photo. The scene is reflected in the astronauts golden-colored visor.
Color photo of a footprint in the lunar surface. It has horizontal treads from the bottom of the astronaut's boot. Despite being a color photo, the image is primarily light gray and black.
#otd

#OnThisDay, 18 May 1953, Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman pilot to break the sound barrier.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AviationHistory #Histodons

A posed photo of Jackie Cochran sitting on the edge of her plane. She's a white woman with blonde hair and is rather implausibly wearing high heels. Breaking the sound barrier as a pilot? In these shoes? I don't think so.
#history #otd #onthisday #histodons #womeninhistory #womenshistory #aviationhistory

17 May is Día das Letras Galegas (Galician Literature Day).

#OnThisDay, 17 May 1863, María Rosalía Rita de Castro's poetry is published. It’s the first publication by a single author in Galician for 400 years. The public holiday was introduced to celebrate the centenary of Rosalia de Castro's work.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Galicia #LiteraryWomen #FlashbackFriday

A Spanish bank note which includes a drawing of María Rosalía Rita de Castro.
#history #otd #onthisday #Flashbackfriday #womeninhistory #galicia #womenshistory #literarywomen

Very early #OnThisDay, 6 May 1944, Marguerite 'Peggy' Knight parachutes into occupied France to be a courier for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French resistance.

Knight fought her way out of an attempted capture, and returned to the UK in September 1944.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WorldWar2 #Histodons

Marguerite 'Peggy' Knight after world war two, with a toddler on her back and a baby sat before her. She is a white woman with dark hair.
#history #otd #onthisday #histodons #womeninhistory #WorldWar2 #womenshistory

#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1967, Katherine Switzer becomes the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon as a registered runner, despite the organiser physically trying to stop her.

She ran it again in 2017, 50 years later.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AmericanHistory

Katherine Switzer running along a road in a grey tracksuit. She is a white woman with dark hair. There are several other men running alongside her, also in running gear. They are protecting her from a man in a blazer who is attempting to rip off the number pinned to her back.
#history #otd #onthisday #americanhistory #womeninhistory

"Instead of the perfect human, Frankenstein created a monster."

#OTD in 1910.

The first movie version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is released in the U.S. by Edison Studios. One of the first horror films, it features unbilled the actor Charles Ogle as Frankenstein's monster, & Mary Fuller as the doctor's fiancée.

The short film Frankenstein is available at @internetarchive
archive.org/details/frankenste…

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445

#books #literature #movie

The Edison Kinetogram Catalogue featuring a still from Frankenstein (1910 film) Thomas Edison / J. Searle Dawley - Sean M. Palfrey (2014-10-20). Screams in the silence: Horror films of the silent era (Part 1). Intravenous Magazine.

Frankenstein (1910) [Restored] : J. Searle Dawley : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Months ago, i learned about the restoration of the first film version of Frankenstein carried out by the Library of Congress and noticed that the picture...
Internet Archive
#books #movie #otd #literature @internetarchive

Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days #OTD in 1890.

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) into fact for the1st time. November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 40,070 kilometer journey. via @wikipedia

Nellie Bly at PG
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/96…

#books
1/

Nellie Bly (Pseudonym of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman), (1867-1922); head and shoulders

Books by Bly, Nellie (sorted by popularity)

Project Gutenberg offers 72,713 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.
Project Gutenberg
#books #otd @Wikipedia

Lebanese writer, poet and visual artist Kahlil Gibran was born #OTD in 1883. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages. His principal works in English (besides the above mentioned) are The Madman, The Forerunner, Sand and Foam, and Jesus, the Son of Man.

Kahlil Gibran at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/18…

#books #literature

Kahlil Gibran, Photograph, Al-Funoon, 1, No. 1 (April 1913)
First edition cover of The Prophet (1923)
The Slave, 1920 (Harvard Art Museums)

Books by Gibran, Kahlil (sorted by popularity)

Project Gutenberg offers 72,562 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.
Project Gutenberg
#books #otd #literature

Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós died #OTD in 1920. He was the leading literary figure in 19th-century Spain, and some scholars consider him second only to Miguel de Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist. He came to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912, but his anticlericalism caused him to be successfully boycotted by the most conservative sectors of Spanish society, represented in traditionalist Catholicism, who did not recognize his intellectual and literary value.
Benito Pérez Galdós By Pau Audouard Deglaire
Title cover of Doña Perfecta by Benito Pérez Galdós
#otd

French educator Louis Braille was born #OTD in 1809.

He was the inventor of a reading and writing system named after him, braille, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtually unchanged to this day. He was blinded when he was 3 years old. But when he was still a student, Louis Braille was frustrated by his inability to read and write.
1/

Common Portrait of Louis Braille doctored by myself. Over 100 Years old.
#otd

The Apollo 8 astronauts performed lunar orbit insertion #OTD in 1968.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit the moon, the first to see an earthrise, fifty five years ago today.

Anders spotted the Earth coming up over the Moon’s horizon:

"Oh my God, look at that picture over there! It's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!"

Image: NASA

A color photo taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts of Earth rising over the horizon of the Moon. There are subtle variations in the moons gray surface corresponding to craters and other features. The swirl of clouds is distinct on the rising Earth, along with blue oceans and tan and green land masses.
#otd

December 18th, 256 BCE—#OTD #OnThisDay the foremen of a group of stonecutters write to the architect Kleon, complaining that the quarry supervisor is wearing away their tools by assigning them all the hard stone while he assigns his own men all the soft stone.

papyri.info/ddbdp/sb;18;13881

the recto of the linked papyrus

sb.18.13881 = HGV SB 18 13881 = Trismegistos 2611

papyri.info
#otd #onthisday

A paper by the Reverend John Michell was read before the Royal Society #OTD in 1783. It included the first prediction of what, given the understanding of gravity at the time, you might call a Black Hole.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi…

The abstract reads: On the Means of difcovering the Difance, Magnitud, Sec. of the Fixed Stars, in confequence of the Diminution of the Velocity of their Light, in cafe fuch a Diminution fould be found to take place in any of them, and fuch other Data fould be procured from Obfervations, as would be farther necefary for that Purpofe. By the Rev. John Michell, B. D. F. R. S. In a Letter to Henry Cavendith, Ef. F. R. S. and A. S. Read November 27, 1783.
The paragraph reads: 16. Hence, according to article 10, if the femi-diameter of a fphare of the fame denfity with the fun were to exceed that of the fun in the proportion of goo to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it, would have acquired at its furface a greater velocity than that of light, and confeguently, fup-poling light to be attracted by the fame force in proportion to its vis inertize, with other bodies, all light emitted from fuch a body would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity.
#otd

Who wants to live forever?
Dne 24. 11. 1991 umřel Freddie Mercury. #OTD
Freddie Mercury.
#otd

Klára Dán von Neumann died #OTD in 1963.

Hungarian mathematician, self-taught engineer and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer. Klára made significant contributions to the world of programming, including work on the Monte Carlo method, ENIAC, and MANIAC I. She was introduced to a lot of her work through her husband, John von Neumann. via @wikipedia

#science #mathematics

This photograph of Klara Dan von Neumann was taken by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt and published in Time Life magazine.
#science #Mathematics #otd @Wikipedia

"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be."
Dracula

Irish novelist and critic, who created Count Dracula, Bram Stoker was born #OTD in 1847. Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but completely fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to the story.

Bram Stoker at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/19…

#books #literature

Bram Stoker (1847-1912), novelist born in Ireland, author of "Dracula".
Dracula, by Bram Stoker - First Edition cloth cover, 1897 British Library Board
#books #otd #literature

Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She discovered fission in uranium with Otto Frisch, and was the first person to understand both its mechanics and implications.

Per usual, the Nobel Committee awarded a prize to some of her colleagues, but left her off.

Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation (photographer unknown)

Black and white photo of Lise Meitner. She is standing in what appears to be a greenhouse, as there are several large plants behind her. Meitner is wearing a dark dress and blouse, with a high collar and hat. She is looking to the left of the photographer, with her hands clasped in front of her.
#otd

Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815.

The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but in 1872 he announced that he had succeeded in creating a ~monster~.

Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Black and white photo of Karl Weierstrass in his later years. His white hair is receding, longer in the back, and he is wearing a dark suit with a white collared shirt underneath.
#otd

46 years ago today
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is the only relevant studio album by the English punk rock band The Sex Pistols, which was released on October 28, 1977 on Virgin Records in the UK and on November 11, 1977 on Warner Bros. in the USA.

#punk #punkrock #history #punkrockhistory #otd

#history #otd #punk #PunkRock #punkrockhistory

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!

Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library

Black and white photo of Jocelyn Bell Burrell, when she was a graduate student, holding a printout on a roll of paper and standing in front of a large radio dish. She is wearing a coat and glasses, smiling and looking toward the camera.
#otd

"The face, which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away —
And yet my days go on, go on."
De Profundis (1862)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died #OTD in 1861. Her work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. via @Wikipedia

Books by Elizabeth Barrett Browning at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/78…

#books #literature #poetry

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. via @wikipedia
Title page of Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning which is available at PG: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56621

Books by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (sorted by popularity)

Project Gutenberg offers 70,990 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.
Project Gutenberg
#books #poetry #otd #literature @Wikipedia

First performance of O Canada at the Congrès national des Canadiens-Français. The song would later become the national anthem of Canada #OTD in 1880.

The song was originally commissioned by Lieutenant Governor of Quebec Théodore Robitaille for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony; Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The original French lyrics were translated to English in 1906. via @Wikipedia

#music

Sheet music for an English language version of O Canada published in 1906. via @wikipedia
#music #otd @Wikipedia

Artist Ralph McQuarrie was born #OTD in 1929. He is probably best known as the primary concept artist for the Star Wars movies, but he also did work for Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and E.T., and he won an Academy Award for his work on Cocoon.

Image: Ralph McQuarrie

McQuarrie's 1975 painting "Y-Wing Attacks the Death Star" shows a metallic blue proto-Death Star in the background. Two Y-Wing fighters in the foreground are diving towards it.
Two droids, early visions of C-3PO and R2-D2, moving across a desert. The tall golden droid resembles the C-3PO of the movie, but has the sleek, art deco look of Maria from the film "Metropolis." A canister-shaped R2-D2 is in the background.
McQuarrie sitting at his drawing table. He is wearing a navy crew neck sweater and smoking a pipe. His hair is gray and swept back. There are numerous markers, pens, and erasers on the table, as well as a circle template and many scraps of paper.
McQuarrie’s concept painting of Luke Skywalker standing on a bluff, looking at a distant Mos Eisley through binoculars. He is carrying a long rifle, and his land speeder is recognizable behind him. You can just make out 3PO and R2 next to the vehicle.
#otd

Happy 33rd birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope, launched onboard space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) #OTD in 1990.

The 2023 anniversary image is the nebula NGC 1333, a star forming region about 970 light years away in the constellation Perseus.

Image: NASA, ESA, STScI

NASA’s image description: Ferocious stellar winds, likely from the bright blue star at the top of the image, are blowing through a curtain of dust. The fine dust scatters the starlight at blue wavelengths. Farther down, another bright, super-hot star shines through filaments of obscuring dust, looking like the Sun shining through scattered clouds. A diagonal string of fainter accompanying stars looks reddish because dust is filtering starlight, allowing more of the red light to get through. The bottom of the picture presents a keyhole peek deep into the dark nebula. Hubble captures the reddish glow of ionized hydrogen. It looks like a fireworks finale, with several overlapping events. This is caused by pencil-thin jets shooting out from newly forming stars outside the frame of view. These stars are surrounded by circumstellar disks, which may eventually produce planetary systems, and powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas deep into space, like a double light saber from science fiction films. They sculpt patterns on the hydrogen cocoon, like laser-light-show tracings. The jets are a star's birth announcement.
#otd

76 years young 🔥🍾💥

Happy Birthday to James Newell Osterberg aka Iggy Pop, designated the "Godfather of Punk, born on this day in 1947, Muskegon, Michigan

Photo by Rob Baker Ashton

#punk #punks #punkrock #iggypop #history #punkrockhistory #otd

#history #otd #punk #punks #PunkRock #punkrockhistory #iggypop

Happy Birthday to Walter Rodney, who was born #OTD in Guyana in 1942! After becoming a professor in Jamaica, he was barred from the country for his communist views, a decision which caused riots in his support. He later taught and lectured around the world, especially in Tanzania. His book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” made him a towering figure in anti-colonial circles.

You can buy today's artwork here: l-boe.redbubble.com/

#history #Guyana #communism #PanAfricanism #HiaG #Mar23

A pen and ink drawing of Rodney's head, with squiggly lines radiating from him. His name is written to his right, and there's a rainbow gradient in the background.

L-BOE Shop | Redbubble

L-BOE is an independent artist creating amazing designs for great products such as t-shirts, stickers, posters, and phone cases.
Redbubble
#history #otd #mar23 #hiag #panafricanism #communism #guyana

#OtD 22 Jan 1891 Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia. His key contribution was his theory of hegemony, which describes how the capitalist class maintains power through its domination of culture. Commemorative merch here: shop.workingclasshistory.com/e…

Products

Online shop for the Working Class History project: radical, union, labor, socialist, communist, feminist, Black history, anti-colonial, LGBT+, disability rights, anarchist and anti-racist products and merchandise. Purchases support the WCH project.
Working Class History | Shop
#otd

Émilie du Châtelet, who hypothesized conservation of energy, established kinetic energy as distinct from momentum and proportional to (speed)², and combined work by Newton and Leibniz with her own original ideas in "Institutions de Physique," was born #OTD in 1706.

Du Châtelet is an important figure in the development of classical physics, but she is not nearly as well known as many of her male contemporaries.

Portrait: M. Q. de La Tour

Color portrait of Émilie du Châtelet. She has papers spread out before her and holds a compass to them with her right hand. Her left elbow rests on the table and her hand is propped against her cheek. She is wearing a green dress with a green bow at her neck, and white frilly sleeves.
#otd

Today is the 50th anniversary of the last time humans went to the Moon.

Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo program and the last time we ventured beyond low Earth orbit, launched from Kennedy Space Center #OTD in 1972.

Images: NASA flic.kr/s/aHskm64ger
#Apollo50

Color photo of the lunar lander returning to the orbiter above the Moon's surface.
A color photo of the Apollo 17 lunar rover. The sun is just outside the frame, causing long shadows and substantial optical artifacts. An astronaut in the distance is seen in profile. The rover has a large radio dish mounted on the back.
One of the Apollo 17 astronauts standing with the rose. Their visor is a reflective gold color, while copper-colored foil wraps many of the components of the rover. A large, umbrella-like radio dish is mounted on the from of the rover. A large gray hill rises in the background.
A color photo of Earth taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts. The arc of the planet cuts down the middle of the photo, with part of Earth occupying the left-hand side of the frame. There is a great deal of swirling white cloud cover over blue oceans and brown land masses. Madagascar is visible, as well as parts of Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Apollo 17 Magazine 148/NN

(Color) Earth, LM Inspection, Orbital; NASA photographs; unprocessed 1800 dpi Hasselblad film scans by Johnson Space Center, circa 2005
Project Apollo Archive (Flickr)
#otd #apollo50

Chemist Rachel Fuller Brown was born #OTD in 1898. She discovered the antifungal antibiotic nystatin while doing research for the NY State Department of Health, hence the name.

Rather than keep the profits from the drug, Brown (standing in the photo) and co-discoverer Elizabeth Hazen assigned nystatin’s patent royalties to the nonprofit Research Corporation of New York, to help support other researchers.

Image: Smithsonian Institution

Photo of Rachel Fuller Brown (standing) and Elizabeth Hazel. The photo is black and white. They are both wearing white lab coats and have gray or white hair. Brown is holding a flask and another piece of chemistry equipment. She is looking into the neck of the flask. Hazel is seated in front of a microscope.
#otd

Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She discovered fission in uranium with Otto Frisch, and was the first person to understand both its mechanics and its implications.

Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation (photographer unknown)

Black and white photo of Lise Meitner. She is standing in what appears to be a greenhouse, as there are several large plants behind her. Meitner is wearing a dark dress and blouse, with a high collar and hat. She is looking to the left of the photographer, with her hands clasped in front of her.
#otd

#OtD 11 Sep 1973 right-wing general Pinochet launched a coup against the elected left-wing government in Chile of Salvador Allende. Backed by the US and UK, Pinochet went on to torture, jail and kill 10,000s of working class activists.
#otd

#OtD 10 Jul 2013 Ali İsmail Korkmaz, a 19-year-old university student, died following a brutal beating by police in Turkey during the Occupy Gezi anti-government protests. libcom.org/tags/occupy-gezi

Occupy Gezi

libcom.org
#otd

#OtD 17 May 1972 10,000 schoolchildren in the UK walked out on strike in protest against corporal punishment. Within two years, London state schools banned corporal punishment. The rest of the country followed in 1987. libcom.org/history/timeline-uk…

Timeline of UK schoolchildren's strikes

A chronology of school pupil walkouts which I have been able to discover in the UK from the 19th century to today.
libcom.org
#otd

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