| Date | Text | |
|---|---|---|
22 Dec 1887
Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden |
death Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden Died 22 Dec 1887 at age 58 (born 7 Sep 1829). American geologist and explorer of the U.S. West. After finishing a medical school training (1853), his early career began in paleontology for James Hall, collecting fossils in the Badlands and the Upper Missouri Valley. It is believed he made the first North American discovery of dinosaur remains (1854) during this expedition. During the Civil War, he served as a surgeon in the Civil War, after which he resumed his western explorations. His work in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains helped lay the foundation of the U.S. Geological Survey. Hayden is credited with having the Yellowstone geyser area declared the first national park (1872). He hosted the Western botanical journey of Gray and Hooker in 1877. |
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22 Dec 1887
Srinivasa Ramanujan |
birth Srinivasa Ramanujan Born 22 Dec 1887; died 26 Apr 1920 at age 32. Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who did notable work on hypergeometric series and continued fractions. In number theory, he discovered properties of the partition function. Although self-taught, he was one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. He worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. His remarkable familiarity with numbers, was shown by the following incident. While Ramanujan was in hospital in England, his Cambridge professor, G. H. Hardy, visited and remarked that he had taken taxi number 1729, a singularly unexceptional number. Ramanujan immediately responded that this number was actually quite remarkable: it is the smallest integer that can be represented in two ways by the sum of two cubes: 1729=13+123=93+103. |
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