Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Today in History: February 13

  • 1766 English political economist Thomas Malthus born; established the geometric Malthusian population growth model.
  • 1805 German mathematician Peter Dirichlet born; trigonometric convergence; invented the modern definition of a function, in 1837.
  • 1910 American phycist William Shockley born; 1956 Nobel (with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) for the transistor.
  • 1912 American physicist Robert Millikan began his Oil Drop experiment, measuring the charge of an electron; 1923 Nobel.
  • 1946 Demonstration of world's first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert; included 17,468 vacuum tubes.
  • 1974 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970 literature Nobel, is exiled from the Soviet Union.
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