Template:Selected anniversaries/April 2
1565: Explorer Cornelis de Houtman born. De Houtman will discover a new sea route from Europe to Indonesia, beginning the Dutch spice trade.
1618: Mathematician and physicist Francesco Maria Grimaldi born. Grimaldi, along with Riccioli, will investigate the free fall of objects, confirming that the distance of fall was proportional to the square of the time taken.
1872: Painter and inventor Samuel Morse dies. Morse co-invented the Morse code.
1898: Mathematician Chiungtze C. Tsen born. Tsen will prove Tsen's theorem, which states that a function field K of an algebraic curve over an algebraically closed field is quasi-algebraically closed (i.e., C1).
1902: Graphic designer and typographer Jan Tschichold born. Tschichold will become a leading advocate of Modernist design, but later condemn Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and inherently fascistic.
1915: Nuclear physicist Donald J. Hughes born. Hughes will be one of the signers of the Franck Report in June, 1945, recommending that the United States not use the atomic bomb as a weapon to prompt the surrender of Japan in World War II.
1923: Polymath George Spencer-Brown born. Spencer-Brown will write the unorthodox and influential Laws of Form, calling it the "primary algebra" and the "calculus of indications".
1976: Mathematician, checkers player, and Gnomon algorithm theorist Marion Tinsley visits the Nested Radical coffeehouse in New Minneapolis, Canada, where he plays checkers against several well-known criminal mathematical functions, including Gnotilus and Killer Poke. Tinsley easily defeats all of his opponents, calling them "lightweights and wanna-bees".
1979: A Soviet bio-warfare laboratory at Sverdlovsk accidentally releases airborne anthrax spores, killing at least 66 plus an unknown number of livestock. The Sverdlovsk anthrax leak was an incident in which spores of anthrax were accidentally released from the Sverdlovsk-19a military research facility on the southern edge of the city of Sverdlovsk (formerly, and now again, Yekaterinburg) on April 2, 1979. This accident is sometimes called "biological Chernobyl". The ensuing outbreak of the disease resulted in approximately 100 deaths, although the exact number of victims remains unknown.
2004: Computer scientist, engineer, and academic John Argyris dies. Argyris pioneered the use of computer applications in science and engineering, was among the creators of the finite element method.
2016: Pink City voted Picture of the Day by the citizens of New Minneapolis, Canada.