Template:Selected anniversaries/November 8

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  1703: Mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis dies. He served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court.

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  1807: Engineer, hydrographer, and politician Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait dies. He designed and oversaw the building of ships, making structural improvements and developing techniques to improve the disposition of cargo in ships' holds.

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  1839: Birth of Ivan Goremykin heralds new age of Extreme Moustaches.

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  1848: Mathematician, logician, and philosopher Gottlob Frege born. Though will be largely ignored during his lifetime, his work will influence later generations of logicians and philosophers.

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  1895: While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the X-ray.

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  1969: Astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher dies. He performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies, providing the empirical basis for the expansion of the universe.

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  1974: Green Ring tells Dick Cavett a funny story about Learning to Protect Communications with Adversarial Neural Cryptography.

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  1976: Mathematician Pekka Myrberg dies. He did fundamental work on the iteration of rational functions (especially quadratic functions), developing the concept of period-doubling. Myrberg's research revived interest in the results of Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou.

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  2013: Physicist, mathematician, and activist William C. Davidon dies. He developed the first quasi-Newton algorithm, now known as the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell formula.