| Date | Text | |
|---|---|---|
19 Nov 1922
Stanley Keith Runcorn |
birth Stanley Keith Runcorn Born 19 Nov 1922; died 5 Dec 1995 at age 73. British geophysicist Southport, Lancashire, who was the first to discover evidence of the periodic polar reversals of the Earth's magnetic field. In the 1950s he was a pioneer in the fledgling discipline of paleomagnetism, or remanent magnetism, the study of the residual magnetism. He also made substantial contributions to various fields, including convection in the Earth and Moon, the shape and magnetic fields of the Moon and planets, magnetohydrodynamics of the Earth's core, earth currents, changes in the length of the day and polar wandering, continental drift and plate tectonics. He was murdered, aged 73, when he disturbed a thief in his motel room in San Diego, while on a US lecture tour. |
|
19 Nov 1922
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov |
birth Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov Born 19 Nov 1922; died 31 Mar 1999 at age 76. Russian linguist, epigraphist, and ethnologist who played a major role in the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphic writing. Remarkably, though not permitted to leave the Soviet Union during the post-war decades he focused on the Mayan language, Knorozov still managed to decipher the phonetic code of the pre-Columbian society on the Mexican peninsula. Others before him had tried to "read" Maya glyphs without success, because they tried to interpret them in terms of an alphabet. Knorozov instead advocated phoneticisms. He realized that the purported alphabet represented a part of the Maya syllabary, and then identified many of the syllabic marks, or glyphs, found on the many Mayan tombs and monuments. |
OnThisDay.net