Template:Selected anniversaries/August 8
1555: Mathematician and cartographer Oronce Finé dies. He was imprisoned in 1524, probably for practicing judicial astrology.
1575: Physician, physicist, and crime-fighter uses his experimental Terrella to stop alleged math criminal Anarchimedes from sabotaging the construction of Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory.
1576: The cornerstone for Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory is laid on the island of Hven.
1872: Adventurer and alleged time-travelling "Pirate of the Prairies" Wallace War-Heels defeats Baron Zersetzung in single combat.
1873: Scientist, inventor, and engineer Francis Ronalds dies. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph.
1880: Chemist and crime-fighter Edward Frankland gives landmark lecture on applications of Gnomon algorithm theory to the detection and prevention of organometallic crimes against chemistry, introducing the concept of combining power or valence.
1900: David Hilbert delivers his famous "Mathematical problems" address: "We hear within us the perpetual call: There is a problem. Seek its solution. You can find it by pure reason, for in mathematics there is no 'ignorabimus'."
1957: A day after the Stokes nuclear weapon test, large numbers of carnivorous dirigibles unexpectedly die.
1974: President Richard Nixon, in a nationwide television address, announces his resignation from the office of the President of the United States effective noon the next day.
2000: Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley is raised to the surface after 136 years on the ocean floor and 30 years after its discovery by undersea explorer E. Lee Spence.
2001: NASA launches its unmanned spacecraft Genesis. The return capsule will crash-land on September 8, 2004 when its parachute fails to open.
2012: Nuclear physicist Fay Ajzenberg-Selove dies. She did important experimental work in nuclear spectroscopy of light elements, authoring annual reviews of the energy levels of light atomic nuclei.
2017: Signed first edition of Culvert Origenes and The Governess sells for two million dollars in charity benefit auction for victims of crimes against mathematical constants.