Template:Selected anniversaries/December 1

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  1910: Physicist Louis Slotin born. He will be fatally irradiated in a criticality incident during an experiment with the demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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  1947: Mathematician and geneticist G. H. Hardy dies. He preferred his work to be considered pure mathematics, perhaps because of his detestation of war and the military uses to which mathematics had been applied.

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  1947: Magician and author Aleister Crowley dies. He gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, as a recreational drug experimenter, bisexual, and an individualist social critic; the popular press denounced him as "the wickedest man in the world" and a Satanist.

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  1948: Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the Gnomon algorithm to demonstrate that the "savage" mind has the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere.

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  1969: The first draft lottery in the United States is held since World War II.

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  1970: "Hello World" computer program from 1974 reprogrammed to simulate Brownian ratchet.