October 8

Are You Sure ... (October 8, 2020)

Amazing Stories (June 1947) featuring "The Shaver Mystery" by Richard Sharpe Shaver.

• ... that writer and artist Richard Sharpe Shaver (8 October 1907 – 5 November 1975) achieved notoriety with stories in which he claimed that he had personal experience with a sinister, ancient civilization that harbors fantastic technology in caverns under the earth?

• ... that mathematician Joseph Wedderburn (2 February 1882 – 9 October 1948) showed that every semisimple algebra finite-dimensional can be constructed as a direct sum of simple algebras, and that every simple algebra is isomorphic to a matrix algebra for some division ring; and that the Artin–Wedderburn theorem generalizes this result with the ascending chain condition?

• ... that SN 1604, also known as Kepler's Supernova, was a Type Ia supernova that occurred in the Milky Way, in the constellation Ophiuchus; that it appeared in 1604; and that prior to the adoption of the current naming system for supernovae, it was named for Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer who described it in De Stella Nova ("The New Star")?

• ... that theoretical physicist Tullio Regge (11 July 1931 – 23 October 2014) introduced Regge calculus, a simplicial formulation of general relativity; and that Regge calculus was the first discrete gauge theory suitable for numerical simulation, and an early relative of lattice gauge theory?

Screenshot: Are You Sure (October 8, 2020)

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1604: The supernova now called "Kepler's nova" was first sighted in the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer. Johannes Kepler observed it from the time of its appearance as an apparently new star. It encouraged him to write The New Star in 1606.

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  1860: Telegraph line between Los Angeles and San Francisco opens.

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  1907: Author and illustrator Richard Sharpe Shaver born. He will write stories in which he claimed that he has had personal experience of a sinister, ancient civilization that harbors fantastic technology in caverns under the earth.

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  1924: Mathematician and statistician John Nelder born. He will contribute to experimental design, analysis of variance, computational statistics, and statistical theory. He will also be responsible, with Max Nicholson and James Ferguson-Lees, for debunking the Hastings Rarities.

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  1942: Physicist, mathematician, and engineer Sergey Chaplygin dies. He is known for mathematical formulas such as Chaplygin's equation, and for a hypothetical substance in cosmology called Chaplygin gas, named after him.

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  1985: Mathematician, cryptographer, and author Gordon Welchman dies. During the Second World War, he developed traffic analysis techniques for breaking German codes.