Monday, April 28, 2008

Today in History: April 28

  • 1758 James Monroe born; 5th President of the United States; created the Monroe Doctrine.
  • 1900 Dutch astrophysicist Jan Oort born; discovered that that Milky Way was a galaxy by analysing star and hydrogen gas cloud movements; created the Oort Cloud model of comet genesis.
  • 1906 Austrian-American mathematician Kurt Gödel born; created Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (1931), proving that Bertrand Russell couldn't axiomatize Arithmetic.
  • 1928 American astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker born; pioneer of asteroid Earth-strike geological theories; initiated geology training of Apollo lunar astronauts; coined "regolith"; co-discovered Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9, which impacted on Jupiter with larger-than-Earth effects.
  • 1945 Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by a firing squad.
  • 1952 United States ends occupation of Japan; Japan remains a racist country to this day.
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