Template:Are You Sure/May 8

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution; 26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794) was a French nobleman and chemist central to the 18th-century chemical revolution who had a profound influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology. Lavoisier was a powerful member of a number of aristocratic councils, and an administrator of the Ferme générale. The Ferme générale was one of the most hated components of the Ancien Régime because of the profits it took at the expense of the state, the secrecy of the terms of its contracts, and the violence of its armed agents. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research. At the height of the French Revolution, he was accused by Jean-Paul Marat of selling adulterated tobacco and of other crimes, and was guillotined on May 8, 1794, a year after Marat's death.

-Lavoisier by Jacques-Léonard Maillet. Stone, ca. 1853. 5th statue from Pavillon Colbert to Pavillon Sully, Cour Napoléon in the Louvre.

• ... that Antoine Lavoisier:

• Played a key role in changing chemistry from a qualitative science to a quantitative science
• Discovered the role oxygen plays in combustion
• Named named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783)
• Opposed the phlogiston theory
• Helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements
• Helped to reform chemical nomenclature
• Predicted the existence of silicon (1787) and was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element (1777) rather than a compound
• Discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same
• Was executed as a traitor during the French Revolution?

• ... that mathematician John Henry Constantine "Henry" Whitehead (1904–1960) was one of the founders of homotopy theory, which originated in algebraic topology as a systematic study of situations in which maps come with homotopies between them; and that J.J. Rotman, in his book on algebraic topology, as a tribute to Whitehead's intellect, stated: "There is a canard that every textbook of algebraic topology either ends with the definition of the Klein bottle or is a personal communication to J. H. C. Whitehead."?