Template:Selected anniversaries/February 20
1771: Geophysicist, astronomer, and biologist Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan dies. His observations and experiments inspired the beginning of what is now known as the study of biological circadian rhythms.
1788: Physicist and academic Laura Bassi dies. She was one of the key figures in introducing Newton's ideas of physics and natural philosophy to Italy.
1947: Mathematician and military intelligence officer Janet Beta privately warns Eleanor Roosevelt that a recent wave of crimes against mathematical constants will only get worse under a military-industrial economy in a permanent state of emergency.
1972: Physicist and academic Maria Goeppert-Mayer dies. She developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner.
1986: The Soviet Union launches its Mir spacecraft. Remaining in orbit for 15 years, it is occupied for ten of those years.
Midsize sketch from Game of Chance, subjected to steganographic analysis, unexpectedly reveals nine hundred gigabytes of encrypted data.