National Geographic SocietyIn partnership with

Stranger Fruit

January 28th

1540 – Birth of Ludolph van Ceulen, German mathematician

1608 – Birth of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Italian physiologist and physicist

1611 – Birth of Johannes Hevelius, Polish astronomer

1622 – Birth of Adrien Auzout, French astronomer

1687 – Death of Johannes Hevelius, Polish astronomer

1701 – Birth of Charles Marie de La Condamine, French mathematician and geographer

1755 – Birth of Samuel Thomas von Sömmering, German physician

1820 – Expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev discovered the Antarctic continent

1864 – Death of Émile Clapeyron, French engineer and physicist

1884 – Birth of Auguste Piccard, Swiss physicist

1915 – Death of Nikolay Umov, Russian physicist

1922 – Birth of Robert W. Holley, American biochemist, Nobel Prize Laureate

1950 – Death of Nikolai Luzin, Russian mathematician

1986 – Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart 73 seconds after liftoff killing all seven astronauts onboard

1988 – Death of Klaus Fuchs, German physicist

Comments

#1 Thony C.
January 28, 2007

I shall probably regret this but Hevelius was not Polish but German.
#2 John Lynch
January 28, 2007

Clearly looking at the Wikipedia/Talk page for the entry on Hevelius there is a little bit of a controversy about this.
#3 Thony C.
January 28, 2007

Unfortunately like the supposed controversy about the nationality of Copernicus this has to do with nationalism and not historical facts. I am neither a German nor a Pole but I am a serious historian of science one of whom’s special areas of study is the “new astronomy” Heveilus was German speaking of German decent living in a, at that time, German city and so is indisputably German. Copernicus by the way was neither German nor Polish but an Ermländer! However having said all that the nationalist will still insist on their controversy, which is why I said that I would regret this!
#4 John Lynch
January 28, 2007

> a serious historian of science

As opposed to a comedic historian of science?

In any case, I’m not taking a stance on this – I just took the wording from Wikipedia.