2004 Five persons by the collapse of a 30x50-meter section of the roof over a waiting area of terminal 2E at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, near Paris, France, at 06:55 (04:55 UT). That terminal had been inaugurated in June 2003, after at least two construction delays due to safety issues.
2001 Asher Iluz [photo>], 33, Israeli, in a cross-fire ambush on the road outside Ariel, West Bank. He driving his car on his way to supervise a road paving between Ariel to Rehalim. Also in the car was his bodyguard Yitzhak Goldstein, 29. The shots came from the village of Ariel. The two Israelis drove 300 meters under fire before Iluz was fatally shot in the head and Goldstein was wounded by shrapnel after he managed to fire back at the ambushers. The ambushers used both M-16s and Kalashnikov submachine guns. This brings the al-Aqsa intifada body count to 472 Palestinians and 85 Israelis.2001: 14 Mexican undocumented immigrants, of thirst, 40 km inside the US, in the desert near Wellton, Arizona, with temperatures reaching 46ºC. They were among a group of 27 smuggled into the US on 19 May east of Yuma in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The smugglers left them there, promising to return with water and instructing them to walk for "a couple of hours" to a highway (which actually was more than 80 km away). One of the survivors dies the next day while being transported to a hospital by the Border Patrol.
2001 Jonathan Stauffer, 15, of neisseria meninigitidis, freshman at West Branch High School, in Alliance, Ohio. The death from the same cause of another student from the same school on 28 May would cause a scare and motivate a preventive mass vaccination.
1994 Miguel Peralta, teniente, por una bomba adosada a su coche por terroristas de ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna).
1992 Giovanni Falcone, anti-mafia judge, by the explosion of 500 kg of TNT at the passage of his car in Palermo.
1992 Bo and Virginia Simmons, of Daingerfield, Texas, murdered. Of this Tony Lee Walker, a Black, would be convicted in 1993. He would be executed by lethal injection on 10 September 2002.
1992 Atahualpa Yupanqui, cantautor y escritor argentino.
1986 Sterling Hayden, actor y escritor estadounidense.
1955 Auguste Elisée Chabaud, French painter, sculptor, and writer, born on 03 (04?) October 1882.
^ 1945 Heinrich Himmler, born on 07 October 1900, Reichsführer of the SS, suicide
The architect of Hitler's program to exterminate European Jews commits suicide in Luneburg prison, one day after being arrested by the British.
As head of the Waffen-Schutzstaffel ("Armed Black Shirts"), the military arm of the Nazi Party, and assistant chief of the Gestapo (the secret police), Himmler was able over time to consolidate his control over all police forces of the Reich. The power he would ultimately wield would rival that of the German army; it would also prove highly effective in eliminating all opposition to Hitler and the party, as well as in carrying out the Führer's Final Solution. It was Himmler who organized the creation of death camps throughout Eastern Europe and a pool of slave laborers.
Himmler's megalomania, which included a plan to surrender to the Western Allies late in the war in order to pursue the fight against Russia unimpeded, caused Hitler to strip him of all his offices and order his arrest. Himmler attempted to slip out of Germany disguised as a soldier, but was caught by the British. He swallowed a cyanide capsule a day later. Himmler has been portrayed in many films, including The Eagle Has Landed, with Donald Pleasance as Himmler.
^ 1941:: 130 sailors on HMS Kelly, sunk by German dive-bombers
One of the survivors is Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, second cousin of King George VI of Britain and the only man other than the king to hold rank in all three military services simultaneously. He is among those thrown into the Mediterranean Sea when his destroyer is among several British cruisers, destroyers, and battleships sunk off Crete by German dive-bombers. The Kelly was attacked by 24 bombers; 130 crewmembers were killed. Mountbatten was still on the bridge of the ship when it finally flipped over; nevertheless, he managed to swim to shore and take control of the rescue operation.
He would ultimately accept, as senior Allied officer present, the surrender of Japanese land forces within Southeast Asia by General Sieshiro Itagaki. Mountbatten survived the terror of war against the Axis powers, only to be killed by an Irish Republic Army bomb, planted on his boat, on 26 August 1979.
Side note: Just a day before the sinking of the Kelly, the battleship Valiant was damaged but not sunk during an equally vicious German air attack, also off Crete, which succeeded in sinking two cruisers and four destroyers. Among the crewmen of the Valiant was Lord Mountbatten's nephew, Prince Philip of Greece.
^ 1937 John Davison Rockefeller Sr., born on 08 July 1839, US industrialist and philanthropist, founder of the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great US business trust.
Rockefeller moved with his family to Cleveland in 1853, and six years later he established his first enterprise, a commission business dealing in hay, grain, meats, and other goods. Sensing the commercial potential of the expanding oil production in western Pennsylvania in the early 1860s, he built his first oil refinery, near Cleveland, in 1863. Within two years it was the largest refinery in the area, and thereafter Rockefeller devoted himself exclusively to the oil business.
In 1870 Rockefeller and a few associates incorporated the Standard Oil Company (Ohio). Because of Rockefeller's emphasis upon economical operations, Standard prospered and began to buy out its competitors until, by 1872, it controlled nearly all the refineries in Cleveland. That fact enabled the company to negotiate with railroads for favored rates on its shipments of oil. It acquired pipelines and terminal facilities, purchased competing refineries in other cities, and vigorously sought to expand its markets in the United States and abroad. By 1882 it had a near monopoly of the oil business in the United States. In 1881 Rockefeller and his associates placed the stock of Standard of Ohio and its affiliates in other states under the control of a board of nine trustees, with Rockefeller at the head. They thus established the first major U.S. “trust” and set a pattern of organization for other monopolies.
The aggressive competitive practices of Standard Oil, which many regarded as ruthless, and the growing public hostility toward monopolies, of which Standard was the best known, caused some industrialized states to enact anti-monopoly laws and led to the passage by the US Congress of the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890). In 1892 the Ohio Supreme Court held that the Standard Oil Trust was a monopoly in violation of an Ohio law prohibiting monopolies. Rockefeller evaded the decision by dissolving the trust and transferring its properties to companies in other states, with interlocking directorates so that the same nine men controlled the operations of the affiliated companies. In 1899 these companies were brought back together in a holding company, Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), which existed until 1911, when the US Supreme Court declared it in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and therefore illegal.
A devout Baptist, Rockefeller turned his attention increasingly during the 1890s to charities and benevolence; after 1897 he devoted himself completely to philanthropy. He made possible the founding of the University of Chicago in 1892, and by the time of his death had given it more than $80 million. In association with his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. [29 Jan 1874 – 11 May 1960], he created major philanthropic institutions, including the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (renamed Rockefeller University) in New York City (1901); the General Education Board (1902); and the Rockefeller Foundation (1913). Rockefeller's benefactions during his lifetime totaled more than $500 million, while his and his son's totaled more than $2.5 billion by 1955.
^ 1934 Bonnie Parker, 23,and Clyde Barrow, 25, shot dead by police
The notorious Depression-era outlaws Bonnie and Clyde are shot to death by Texas and Louisiana state police officers as they attempt to escape apprehension in a stolen 1934 Ford V-8 near Bienville Parish, Louisiana..
Bonnie and Clyde had met in Texas in 1930 while nineteen-year-old Bonnie was visiting her husband in a Texas jail, where he was for murder. At the time, Bonnie was tending bar. Clyde was arrested for burglary and sent to prison soon after they met. Bonnie smuggled a gun, taped to her thigh, into prison to help him escape. He was eventually caught in Ohio and brought back to prison. When a personal appeal from his mother to the Texas governor earned his release in 1932, he vowed never to return.
After Bonnie was caught stealing a car, she had to spend three months in prison, while Clyde went on a robbery spree. He then killed a sheriff and deputy at a barn dance in Oklahoma. In the fall of 1932, the pair spent their time carrying out small-time robberies throughout Texas and Oklahoma. At one such robbery, they picked up W. D. Jones, a gas station attendant, who joined their team for the next 18 months. Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother who was recently pardoned by the new Texas governor, Ma Ferguson, also joined the gang, along with his wife. Later they were joined by escaped murderer Raymond Hamilton.
The media latched onto Bonnie and Clyde, who were nicknamed "Suicide Sal" and "Texas Rattlesnake," respectively. The pair loved the attention, posing for snapshots with their arsenal of weapons. In early 1934, they barely escaped a trap in Missouri, killing two lawmen in the ensuing shootout. Buck and his wife, Blanche, were shot and captured, but Buck died from his wounds. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer finally caught up with Bonnie and Clyde in May, after tracking them for more than three months.
For over two years, the couple evaded local police officers in rural counties of Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, and it was not until the Bureau of Investigation (later known as the FBI) became involved that the law finally gained ground on Bonnie and Clyde. The Bureau of Investigation, curiously enough, could only investigate the two on the grounds of the National Motor Vehicle Act, which stipulated that federal agents had jurisdiction to pursue suspects accused of interstate transportation of a stolen automobile. Investigators initially traced a stolen vehicle to the house of Clyde Barrow's aunt. As officers stepped up the pressure to catch Bonnie and Clyde, the well-armed couple went about adding to their own firepower.
In the spring of 1934, following a tip, federal agents traced the gang to a remote county in southwest Louisiana. A certain Methvin family was said to have been aiding and abetting the Bonnie and Clyde gang for over a year and it was learned that Bonnie and Clyde, along with some of the Methvins, had staged a party at Black Lake, Louisiana, on the night of 21May.
Two days later, just before dawn, a posse of police officers from Texas and Louisiana, including Texas Ranger Frank Hamer who had been tracking the couple for more than three months., laid an ambush for Bonnie and Clyde along the highway near Gibsland and Sailes, Louisiana. In the early morning, Bonnie and Clyde appeared in their tan 1934 Ford V-8. . The officers reported that the coupe attempted to flee, but more likely, owing to the fact that Bonnie and Clyde had killed five policemen, the posse opened fire without warning. In two minutes, deputies shoot 187 bullets. Bonnie and Clyde were each shot over twenty times, and were dead by the time their Ford rolled to a stop against an embankment on the south side of the road. Their bullet-riddled 1934 Ford later became a valuable collectible.
Bonnie and Clyde gained a place in popular mythology as dustbowl Robin Hoods. The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty as Clyde and Faye Dunaway as Bonnie, portrayed a charming and irreverent pair who took their game too far. Examination of the couple's past, as well as an examination of their victims, shows that Bonnie and Clyde were more likely carefree killers. Their popularity owed to the mistrust of the authorities of the Dustbowl during the Depression era, and to the couple's uncanny ability to elude the police for over two years.
Ibsen was born at Skien, a small lumbering town of southern Norway. His father was a respected general merchant in the community until 1836, when he suffered the permanent disgrace of going bankrupt. As a result, he sank into a querulous penury, which his wife's withdrawn and somber religiosity did nothing to mitigate. There was no redeeming the family misfortunes; as soon as he could, aged just 15, Henrik moved to Grimstad, a hamlet of some 800 persons 110 km down the coast. There he supported himself meagerly as an apothecary's apprentice while studying nights for admission to the university. And during this period he used his few leisure moments to write a play.
This work, Catilina (1850), grew out of the Latin texts Ibsen had to study for his university examinations. Though not a very good play, it showed a natural bent for the theater and embodied themes, the rebellious hero, his destructive mistress, that would preoccupy Ibsen as long as he lived. In 1850 he went to Christiania (known since 1925 by its older name of Oslo), studied for entrance examinations there, and settled into the student quarter—though not, however, into classes. For the theatre was in his blood, and at the age of only 23 he got himself appointed director and playwright to a new theatre at Bergen, in which capacity he had to write a new play every year.
This was a wonderful opportunity for a young man eager to work in drama, but it brought Ibsen up against a range of fearsome problems he was ill-equipped to handle. In the medieval Icelandic sagas Norway possessed a heroic, austere literature of unique magnificence; but the stage on which these materials had to be set was then dominated by the drawing-room drama of the French playwright Eugène Scribe and by the actors, acting traditions, and language of Denmark. Out of these materials young Ibsen was asked to create a “national drama.”
First at Bergen and then at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania from 1857 to 1862, Ibsen tried to make palatable dramatic fare out of incongruous ingredients. In addition to writing plays which were uncongenial to him and unacceptable to audiences, he did a lot of directing. He was too inhibited to make a forceful director, but too intelligent not to pick up a great deal of practical stage wisdom from his experience. After he moved to Christiania and after his marriage to Suzannah Thoresen in 1858, he began to develop qualities of independence and authority that had been hidden before.
Two of the last plays that Ibsen wrote for the Norwegian stage showed signs of new spiritual energy. Kjaerlighedens komedie (1862; Love's Comedy), a satire on romantic illusions, was violently unpopular, but it expressed an authentic theme of anti-idealism that Ibsen would soon make his own; and in Kongsem nerne (1863; The Pretenders) he dramatized the mysterious inner authority that makes a man a man, a king, or a great playwright. This one play was in fact the national drama after which Ibsen had been groping so long, and before long it would be recognized as such. But it came too late; though the play was good, the theatre in Christiania was bankrupt, and Ibsen's career as a stage writer was apparently at an end.
But the death of his theater was the liberation of Ibsen as a playwright. Without regard for a public he thought petty and illiberal, without care for traditions he found hollow and pretentious, he could now write for himself. He decided to go abroad, and applied for a small state grant. He was awarded part of it, and in April 1864 he left Norway for Italy. For the next 27 years he lived abroad, mainly in Rome, Dresden, and Munich, returning to Norway only for short visits in 1874 and 1885. For reasons that he sometimes summarized as “small-mindedness,” his homeland had left a very bitter taste in his mouth.
With him into exile Ibsen brought the fragments of a long semi-dramatic poem to be named Brand . Its central figure is a dynamic rural pastor who takes his religious calling with a blazing sincerity that transcends not only all forms of compromise but all traces of human sympathy and warmth as well. “All or nothing” is the demand that his god makes of Brand and that Brand in turn makes of others. He is a moral hero, but he is also a moral monster, and his heart is torn by the anguish that his moral program demands he inflict on his family. He never hesitates, never ceases to tower over the petty compromisers and spiritual sluggards surrounding him. Yet in the last scene where Brand stands alone before his god, a voice thunders from an avalanche that, even as it crushes the pastor physically, repudiates his whole moral life as well: “He is the god of love,” says the voice from on high. So the play is not only a denunciation of small-mindedness but a tragedy of the spirit that would transcend it. The poem faced its readers not just with a choice but with an impasse; the heroic alternative was also a destructive (and self-destructive) alternative. In Norway Brand was a tremendous popular success, even though (and in part because) its central meaning was so troubling.
Hard on the heels of Brand (1866) came Peer Gynt (1867), another drama in rhymed couplets presenting an utterly antithetical view of human nature. If Brand is a moral monolith, Peer Gynt is a capering will-o'-the-wisp, a buoyant and self-centered opportunist who is aimless, yielding, and wholly unprincipled, yet who remains a lovable and beloved rascal. The wild and mocking poetry of Peer Gynt has ended by overshadowing Brand in the popular judgment. But these two figures are interdependent and antithetical types who under different guises run through most of Ibsen's classic work. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are universal archetypes as well as unforgettable individuals.
With these two poetic dramas, Ibsen won his battle with the world; he paused now to work out his future. A philosophical historical drama on the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate had long been on his mind; he finished it in 1873 under the title Kejser og Galilaeer, but in a ten-act form too diffuse and discursive for the stage. He wrote a modern satire, De unges forbund (1869; The League of Youth) and then after many preliminary drafts a prose satire on small-town politics, Samfundets støtter (1877; Pillars of Society). But Ibsen had not yet found his proper voice; when he did, its effect was not to criticize or reform social life but to blow it up. The explosion came with Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll's House ).
This play presents a very ordinary family—a bank manager named Torvald Helmer, his wife Nora, and their three little children. Torvald supposes himself the ethical member of the family, while his wife assumes the role of a pretty irresponsible in order to flatter him. Into this snug, not to say stifling, arrangement intrude several hard-minded outsiders, one of whom threatens to expose a fraud that Nora had once committed (without her husband's knowledge) in order to obtain a loan needed to save his life. When Nora's husband finally learns about this dangerous secret, he reacts with outrage and repudiates her out of concern for his own social reputation. Utterly disillusioned about her husband, whom she now sees as a hollow fraud, Nora declares her independence of him and their children and leaves them, slamming the door of the house behind her in the final scene.
Audiences were scandalized at Ibsen's refusal in A Doll's House to scrape together (as any other contemporary playwright would have done) a “happy ending,” however shoddy or contrived. But that was not Ibsen's way; his play was about knowing oneself and being true to that self. Torvald, who had thought all along that he was a sturdy ethical agent, proves to be a hypocrite and a weak compromiser; his wife is not only an ethical idealist, but a destructive one, as severe as Brand.
The setting of A Doll's House is ordinary to the point of transparency. Ibsen's plot exploits with cold precision the process known as “analytic exposition.” A secret plan (Nora's forgery) is about to be concluded (she can now finish repaying the loan), but before the last step can be taken, a bit of the truth must be told, and the whole deception unravels. It is a pattern of stage action at once simple and powerful. Ibsen used this technique often, and it gained for him an international audience.
Ibsen's next play, Gengangere (1881; Ghosts ), created even more dismay and distaste than its predecessor by showing worse consequences of covering up even more ugly truths. Ostensibly the play's theme is congenital venereal disease, but on another level, it deals with the power of ingrained moral contamination to undermine the most determined idealism. Even after lecherous Captain Alving is in his grave, his ghost will not be laid to rest. In the play, the lying memorial that his conventionally-minded widow has erected to his memory burns down even as his son goes insane from inherited syphilis and his illegitimate daughter advances inexorably toward her destiny in a brothel. The play is a grim study of contamination spreading through a family under cover of the widowed Mrs. Alving's timidly respectable views.
A play dealing with syphilis on top of one dealing with a wife's abandonment of her family sealed Ibsen's reputation as a Bad Old Man, but progressive theatres in England and all across the Continent began putting on his plays. His audiences were often small, but there were many of them, and they took his plays very seriously. So did conventionally-minded critics; they denounced Ibsen as if he had desecrated all that was sacred and holy. Ibsen's response took the form of a direct dramatic counterattack. Doctor Stockmann, the hero of En folkefiende (1882; An Enemy of the People ), functions as Ibsen's personal spokesman. In the play he is a medical officer, charged with inspecting the public baths on which the prosperity of his native town depends. When he finds their water to be contaminated, he says so publicly, though the town officials and townspeople try to silence him. When he still insists on speaking the truth, he is officially declared an “enemy of the people.” Though portrayed as a victim, Doctor Stockmann, like all Ibsen's idealistic truth-tellers after Brand, also carries within him a deep strain of destructiveness. (His attacks on the baths will, after all, ruin the town; it's just that by comparison with the truth, he doesn't care about this.) Ibsen's next play would make this minor chord dominant.
In Vildanden (1884; The Wild Duck ) Ibsen completely reversed his viewpoint by presenting on stage a gratuitous, destructive truth-teller whose compulsion visits catastrophic misery on a family of helpless innocents. With the help of a number of comforting delusions, Hjalmar Ekdal and his little family are living a somewhat squalid but essentially cheerful existence. Upon these helpless weaklings descends an infatuated truth-teller, Gregers Werle. He cuts away the moral foundations (delusive as they are) on which the family has lived, leaving them despondent and shattered by the weight of a guilt too heavy to bear. The havoc wrought on the Ekdal family is rather pathetic than tragic; but the working out of the action achieves a kind of mournful poetry that is quite new in Ibsen's repertoire.
Each of this series of Ibsen's classic modern dramas grows by extension or reversal out of its predecessor; they form an unbroken string. The last of the sequence is Rosmers holm (1886), in which variants of the destructive saint (Brand) and the all-too-human rogue (Peer) once more strive to define their identities, but this time on a level of moral sensitivity that gives the play a special air of silver serenity. Ex-parson Johannes Rosmer is the ethical personality, while the adventuress Rebecca West is his antagonist. Haunting them both out of the past is the spirit of the parson's late wife, who had committed suicide under the subtle influence, we learn, of Rebecca West, and because of her husband's high-minded indifference to sex. At issue for the future is a choice between bold, unrestricted freedom and the ancient, conservative traditions of Rosmer's house. But even as he is persuaded by Rebecca's emancipated spirit, she is touched by his staid, decorous view of life. Each is contaminated by the other, and for differing but complementary reasons, they tempt one another toward the fatal millpond in which Rosmer's wife drowned. The play ends with a double suicide in which both Rosmer and Rebecca, each for the other's reasons, do justice on themselves.
Ibsen's playwriting career by no means ended with Rosmersholm, but thereafter he turned toward a more self-analytic and symbolic mode of writing that is quite different from the plays that made his world reputation. Among his later plays are Fruen fra havet (1888; The Lady from the Sea), Hedda Gabler (1890), Bygmester Solness (1892; The Master Builder), Lille Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and Naar vi døde vaagner (1899; When We Dead Awaken). Two of these plays, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder, are vitalized by the presence of a demonically idealistic and totally destructive female such as first appeared in Catilina. Another obsessive personage in these late plays is an aging artist who is bitterly aware of his failing powers. Personal and confessional feelings infuse many of these last dramas; perhaps these resulted from Ibsen's decision in 1891 to return to Norway, or perhaps from the series of fascinated, fearful dalliances he had with young women in his later years. After his return to Norway, Ibsen continued to write plays until a stroke in 1900 and another a year later reduced him to a bedridden invalid. He died in Kristiania in 1906.
Ibsen was in the forefront of those early modern authors whom one could refer to as the great disturbers; he belongs with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Blake. Ibsen wrote plays about mostly prosaic and commonplace persons; but from them he elicited insights of devastating directness, great subtlety, and occasional flashes of rare beauty. His plots are not cleverly contrived games but deliberate acts of cognition, in which persons are stripped of their accumulated disguises and forced to acknowledge their true selves, for better or worse. Thus, he made his audiences reexamine with painful earnestness the moral foundation of their being. During the last half of the 19th century he turned the European stage back from what it had become, a plaything and a distraction for the bored, to make it what it had been long ago among the ancient Greeks, an instrument for passing doom-judgment on the soul.
IBSEN ONLINE:
In English translations:
A Doll's House (Gutenberg text)
Early Plays: Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans
An Enemy of the People
Ghosts: A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts
Hedda Gabler
The Lady From the Sea
Little Eyolf
The Master Builder
Peer Gynt
Pillars of Society
Rosmersholm
When We Dead Awaken
The Wild Duck
1895 Franz Ernst Neumann, German mathematician born on 11 Sep 1798. He was the father of mathematician Carl Gottfried Neumann, [07 May 1832 – 27 Mar 1925].
1889 Georges Henri Halphen, French mathematician born on 30 October 1844.
1885 Thomas Clausen, Danish mathematician and astronomer born on 16 January 1801. He wrote over 150 papers on pure mathematics, applied mathematics, astronomy and geophysics. In 1854 he proved that F6, the 6th Fermat number 2n+ 1 where n = 26, is not a prime. It is 18'446'744'073'709'551'617, which, in 1880, Landry prime factored as 274'177x67'280'421'310'721. The first to show that, contrary to Fermat's August 1640 guess, not all the Fermat numbers Fp (numbers of the form 2n+ 1 where n is the pth power of 2) were prime, was Euler [15 Apr 1707 – 18 Sep 1783] in 1732 when he discovered that P5, 2n+ 1 where n = 25, which is 4'294'967'297, has the prime factorization 641x6'700'417. Since then, thanks in part to supercomputers, research into Fermat numbers has gone much further, but no Fermat number has been proved to be a prime beyond the 4th (2n+ 1 where n = 24 , i.e. 216+ 1 = 65'537), but some have been proved not to be prime, including all Fp with 4 < p <23 (but no factor of F14, F20, or F22 has yet been found). For example, on 25 July 1999, John Cosgrave announced that F382'447, 2n+ 1 where n is the 115'128-digit number 2382'447, has the prime factor 3x2382'449+1. It was only in 1970 that F7, the 7th Fermat number (2n+ 1 where n = 27), 340'282'366'920'938'463'463'374'607'431'768'211'457, was prime factorized as (116'503'103'764'643x29+1)x(11'141'971'095'088'142'685 x29+1) which is 59'649'589'127'497'217x5'704'689'200'685'129'054'721, though it had been proved not to be a prime more than 60 years earlier. 1873 Prilidiano Pueyrredón, pintor argentino.
1857 Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Paris mathematician born on 21 August 1857. He pioneered the study of analysis, both real and complex, and the theory of permutation groups. He also researched in convergence and divergence of infinite series, differential equations, determinants, probability and mathematical physics.
1842 José de Espronceda poeta romántico español.
^ Condamnés à mort par la Révolution:
1795 (4 prairial an III):
BEDIN Jean Baptiste, gendarme, domicilié à Paris, comme convaincu d'avoir abandonné le poste de l'arsenal, et de s'être mêlé parmi les révoltés, par le conseil militaire à Paris.
DELORME Guillaume, domicilié à Paris, département de la Seine, capitaine des canonniers de la section de Popincourt, par le conseil militaire, comme convaincu dêtre auteur et complice dun complot tendant à dissoudre la Convention nationale, en assassiner les membres, et davoir subordonné la garde de ladite section.
1794 (4 prairial an II):
CHABRAL François, ex vicaire, domicilié à Troujet (Allier), comme réfractaire à la Loi, , par le tribunal criminel dudit département.
DUMAS Jacques François (dit Fontbroges), ex noble et conseiller au ci-devant parlement de Bordeaux, 60 ans, né à Libourne, domicilié à Bordeaux (Gironde), , par la commission militaire séante à Bordeaux, comme conspirateur, pour avoir entretenu des correspondance avec des contre-révolutionnaires décidés, notamment le commandant du château de Loches, nommé Bois-Lambert.
HOQUOPA Fatté, 20 ans, natif de Meinz en Allemagne, cordonnier, domicilié à Lyon (Rhône), , , par la commission révolutionnaire séante à Lyon, comme fédéraliste.
MOINE Sébastien, prêtre, domicilié à Mourmoiron (Vaucluse), comme réfractaire à la loi, , par le tribunal criminel dudit département.
NOURY Jacques Etienne, prêtre, domicilié à Courtezon (Vaucluse), comme réfractaire à la loi, , par le tribunal criminel dudit département.
ROLAND Jean Baptiste, 75 ans, tisserand, demeurant à Febvin Pilfart, à Arras
DUMETZ Antoine François, 73 ans, menuisier à Febvin Palfart, guillotiné à Arras
Par le tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris:
BARTH Antoine Martin, 33 ans, né et domicilié à Paris, comme conspirateur et comme convaincu d'être complice de la conspiration qui a existé comme les intérêts de la république, à l'effet de l'anéantir, et de rétablir le despotisme, soit en annulant ou faisant annuler différents marchés .
DIDIER Pierre Louis, 35 ans, né à Givry (Aisne), commis papetier, domicilié à Paris, comme convaincu d'avoir tenu des propos, et fait des écrits tendant à anéantir la liberté.
LANOUE Jean Baptiste, 37 ans, peintre en Bâtiment, domicilié à Paris, comme convaincu d'avoir tenu des propos et fait des écrits tendants à anéantir la liberté.
LEMARCHANT Jean François, 69 ans, ouvrier en Guêtres, fournisseur pour la République, né et domicilié à Paris, comme conspirateur et pour fourniture défectueuse dans les magasins de la République.
PROVENCHÈRE Alexandre, ex administrateur de lhabillement, 55 ans, natif de Saint Ecboillé (Seine et Oise), domicilié à Paris, comme prévaricateur, en faisant et favorisant des livraisons de fournitures infidèles et défectueuses dans les magasins de la république.
DORLY André, 60 ans, né à Versailles (Seine et Oise), commis des guerres jusqu'au 1 juillet 1793, domicilié à Paris, comme prévaricateur.
FORTIN Gabriel Joseph, employé à lhabillement des troupes, 44 ans, né et domicilié à Paris, comme prévaricateur.
CANOLLE Jean, 50 ans, natif de Benat en Périgord, minéralogiste, domicilié au Péage du Roussillon, département de lIsère, comme conspirateur.
COITARD Avoye (dit Faville), domiciliée à Paris, département de la Seine, condamnée à mort comme conspiratrice
... comme contre-révolutionnaires:
BAREME Joseph Antoine, 31 ans, né à Tarascon, hussard au 1er régiment ex-noble domicilié à Lyon (Rhône).
BAREME Joseph Auguste, 32 ans, né à Tarascon, ex-noble, hussard au 1er régiment, domicilié à Lyon (Rhône).
BAREME Joseph Henri, 35 ans, né à Tarascon, ex-noble, brigadier fourrier au 1er régiment d'hussards, domicilié à Tarascon (Bouches-du-Rhône).
FERY Anne, veuve Dupré, garde-malade, âgée de 52 ans, née à Mala (Côte-dOr), domiciliée à Paris.
GAUDON Marie Nicolas, 34 ans, né à Mégève (Mont-Blanc), domicilié à Paris.
1793:
GUILBAUD Jean René, domestique, à la Chapelle-Hormier (Vendée), par la commission militaire séante aux Sables, comme brigand de la Vendée.
1782 Virgilius Erichsen, Danish painter, active also in Russia, specialized in portraits (especially of Catherine the Great), born on 02 September 1722. MORE ONERIKSEN AT ART4MAY with links to images.
1726 Jean-Baptiste Nattier, suicide in the Bastille, French painter born on 27 September 1678. — more
^ 1701 Captain William Kidd, hanged, for piracy and murder
At Londons Execution Dock, British privateer William Kidd, popularly known as Captain Kidd, is hanged for his convictions on five counts of piracy and one count of murder.
Born in Strathclyde, Scotland, Kidd established himself as a sea captain before settling in New York, where he bought property and married. In 1695, while in London, the earl of Bellomont, a recently appointed governor of New York, commissioned him to defend English ships from pirates in the Red Sea. In 1696, Kidd sailed to New York aboard the Adventure Galley, enlisted men for the mission, and set sail for the Indian Ocean. The expedition met with little success, and failed to capture a major prize until February 1698, when the Quedagh Merchant, an Indian vessel allegedly sailing under a French pass was taken.
Word of Kidds capture of the merchantman, which was loaded with gold, jewels, silk, sugar, and guns, aroused significant controversy in Britain, as the ship had an English captain. Suspicions that he had turned to piracy were apparently confirmed when he sailed to St. Marys, Madagascar, an infamous pirate haven, where he negotiated with a known pirate and abandoned the Adventure Galley for an unknown purpose.
From there, he traveled to the West Indies on the Quedagh Merchant, where he learned of the piracy charges against him. Intending to clear his name, he sailed to New York and delivered himself to the colonial authorities, claiming that the vessels he had attacked were lawful prizes. However, he was arrested and, as English law did not allow pirates to be tried in the colonies, he was taken to London. In 1701, he was tried on five charges of piracy and one charge of murdering a crewman.
The Tories used the trial as a political opportunity to embarrass his Whig sponsors, and the latter chose to give up Kidd as a scapegoat rather than back his possibly correct claims to legitimacy. He was convicted on all counts, and on 23 May 1701, he was executed by hanging. In later years, a legend grew up around the story of William Kidd, although reports of his fabled buried treasure have not been substantiated.
1668 Philips Wouwerman, Dutch Baroque era painter born in 1619. MORE ONWOUWERMAN AT ART4MAY with links to images.
1648 Louis Le Nain, French Baroque era painter born in 1593 (1603?), brother of Antoine Le Nain [1588 25May 1648] and Mathieu Le Nain le Chevalier [1607 20Apr 1677]. The three brothers worked together, often on the same picture, so that it is impossible to make individual attributions and the three brothers are treated as a single artist. MORE ON LENAINAT ART4MAY with links to images.
1627 Luis de Góngora y Argote, poeta y dramaturgo español.
^ 1498 Girolamo Savonarola Ferrariensis, Domenico da Pescia, and Silvestro Maruffi, tortured, hanged and burnt in Piazza Signoria, in Florence
Savonarola was an Italian Dominican preacher, reformer, and martyr, renowned for his clash with tyrannical rulers and a corrupt clergy. After the overthrow of the Medici in 1494, Savonarola was the sole leader of Florence, setting up a democratic republic. His chief enemies were the Duke of Milan and Pope Alexander VI, who issued numerous restraints against him, all of which were ignored.
Girolamo Savonarola, born on 21 September 1452 in Ferrara, was for some time prior of the Convent of San Marco. Inspired by an aversion for worldly things, and the highest religious ideals, with his example and his obscurely threatening and prophetic sermons he condemned first the corrupt way of life of Florence then the church hierarchy in Rome. Ignoring numerous reprimands and contemptuous of danger, he was condemned to death: together with his fellow friars, da Pescia and Maruffi.
In the beginning Savonarola was filled with zeal, piety, and self-sacrifice for the regeneration of religious life. He was led to offend against these virtues by his fanaticism, obstinacy, and disobedience. He was not a heretic in matters of faith. The erection of his statue at the foot of Luther's monument at Worms as a reputed "forerunner of the Reformation" is entirely unwarranted. Among his writings mention should be made of: Triumphus Crucis de fidei veritate (Florence, 1497), his chief work, an apology for Christianity; Compendium revelationum (Florence, 1495); Scelta di prediche e scritti, Trattato circa il Reggimento di Firenze ; further letters in the Archivio. storico italiano, App. XIII ; poems edited by Rians. The Dialogo della verita (1497) and fifteen sermons were placed later on the Index of Prohibited Books.
SAVONAROLA ONLINE: (English translation): Sermon on the Our Father (11 January 1496)
[click on image for portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo>]
1951 Anatoliy Karpov USSR, world chess champion (1975-1985)
1949 Alan García Pérez president of Peru (1985- )
1934 Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer
1931 José Luis Coll García, humorista español.
1930 Jordi Solé Tura, profesor y político español, uno de los llamados padres de la Constitución.
1928 Ioan Mackenzie James, English topologist. Author of The topology of Stiefel manifolds (1976), Topological and uniform spaces (1987), Fibrewise topology (1988), Introduction to uniform spaces (1989), Handbook of algebraic topology (1995).
1919 Guillermo Díaz Plaja, escritor español.
1914 Barbara Ward economist/writer (Only One Earth)
1914 Lipman “Lipa” Bers, Jewish Latvian US mathematician and human rights activist, who died on 29 October 1993.
^ 1911 New York Public Library
In a ceremony presided over by President William Howard Taft, the New York Public Library, the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States, was dedicated in New York City. Occupying a two-block section of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets, the monumental beaux-arts structure took fourteen years to complete at a cost of nine million dollars. The day after its dedication, the library opened its doors to the public, and some 40,000 citizens passed through its door to make use of a collection that already consisted of more than a million books.
In the late nineteenth century, New York had surpassed Paris in population and was quickly catching up with London, then the world's most populous city, but lacked a public library large enough to serve its many citizens. In 1886, former New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden died, bequeathing to the city $2.4 million to "establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York." The gift remained unspent until May 23, 1895, when New Yorks two largest libraries the Astor and Lenox libraries agreed to combine with the Tilden Trust to form a new entity that would be known as The New York Public Library. Sixteen years later to the day, the main branch of the library was dedicated in midtown Manhattan. Over the next few decades, largely thanks to a $5.2 million gift from steel baron Andrew Carnegie, a system of branch libraries opened throughout New York City. Today, the New York Public Library is visited and used annually by more than 10 million people, and there are currently 2.34 million cardholders, more than for any other library system in the nation.
^ 1908 John Bardeen, inventor of transistor.
John Bardeen, along with William Shockley and Walter Bratton, invented the transistor, which set the stage for all modern microelectronics. Bardeen was also the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics twice.
Bardeen worked as a physicist for the US Navy during World War II. After the war, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on the electronic conducting properties of semiconductors. In 1947, his team invented the transistor, which won the group a Nobel Prize in 1956. Semiconductors replaced vacuum tubes in electronic equipment, making electronics progressively smaller, faster, and more durable.
Bardeen became a professor of physics at the University of Illinois in Urbana. In 1972, he won a second Nobel Prize, with Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer, for their work on the theory of superconductivity. He died in 1991.
1891 Pär Lagerkvist Sweden, novelist/poet/dramatist (Nobel 1951)
1887 Albert Thoralf Skolem, Norwegian mathematician who died on 23 March 1963. He worked on Diophantine equations, mathematical logic, group theory, lattice theory and set theory. He extended work done in 1915 by Löwenheim [26 Jun 1878 – 05 May 1957] to give the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, which states that if a theory has a model then it has a countable model.
1862 Hermann Gunkel, grew up to be the German Protestant biblical scholar who pioneered the analytical approach to understanding Scripture afterward known as "form criticism." Gunkel applied its formulas primarily to the Old Testament, in his commentaries on Genesis (1901) and on the Psalms (1926-28)
1861 Jossef Rippl-Ronai, Hungarian painter, printmaker, pastellist, ceramicist, and designer, who died on 25November 1927. — more
1848 Otto Lilienthal, pioneer aviator.
1846 John Alexander Harrington Bird, British artist who died in 1936.
1844 'Abdu'l-Bah early Bah'ai¡ leader ('Azamat 7, 1)
1824 Gen. Ambrose Burnside, who later was a US senator and for whom sideburns were named.
1813 Charles-Émile Jacque, French Barbizon School painter, printmaker, and illustrator, who died on 07 May 1894. MORE ON JACQUEAT ART4MAY with links to images.
1810 Alfred de Dreux, French artist who died on 05 March 1860.
She would grow up to be a writer and editor who inspired other people in the US to devote themselves to learning. Fuller grew up during the Transcendentalist movement. She taught in the Temple School, an educational institution founded by Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott. She later taught in Providence, Rhode Island.
In 1839 she published a translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; her most cherished project, never completed, was a biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Fuller formed many important friendships during this period, including those with Ralph Waldo Emerson [25 May 1803 – 27 Apr 1882], Elizabeth Peabody [16 May 1804 – 03 Jan 1894], William Ellery Channing, and Orestes Brownson.
She wrote poetry, reviews, and essays for the Transcendentalist quarterly magazine The Dial and edited for the magazine from 1840 to 1842. She published an account of frontier life in the Midwest, called Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844), which captured the attention of New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. Greeley published Fuller's feminist pamphlet Women in the 19th Century (1845), which argued for emotional and intellectual fulfillment for women.
Fuller began writing for The Tribune and became the US's first female foreign correspondent when she sailed for Europe in 1846. Her letters were published in 1856 as At Home and Abroad. In 1847, she settled in Italy and in 1849 secretly married an impoverished Italian nobleman and ardent republican, Giovanni Angelo, Marchese Ossoli (which made her Marchesa Ossoli). On 19 July 1850, Fuller, her husband, and her infant son Angelo all died in a shipwreck off the coast of New York.
FULLER ONLINE:
Life Without and Life Within: or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems (page images) Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 Woman in the Nineteenth Century
1785 Bifocals's invention announced by Benjamin Franklin.
1734 Friedrich Anton Mesmer Austria, physician/hypnotist (Mesmerism) médico alemán, descubridor del magnetismo animal y del hipnotismo.
1707 Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), Swedish physician, naturalist biological classifier. He died on 10 January 1778. He would be the author of Flora Lapponica, Systema Naturae, Genera Plantarum, Species Plantarum, Hortus Cliffortianus, Flora Suecica, Fauna Suecica, Västgöta resa, Skånska resa, Hortus Upsaliensis, Philosophia Botanica, Species Plantarum
1683 Antoine Pesne, French painter who died on 05August 1757. MORE ONPESNE AT ART4MAY with links to images.
1620 Peeter Neeffs, Flemish painter who died after 1675. — more
1614 (baptized) Bertholet Flémal, Flemish painter and architect who died on 10July 1675. — more
1606 Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, Spanish Cistercian, theologian, military engineer, mathematician, who died on 07 September 1682.
1598 Claude Mellan, French draftsman, engraver, and painter who died on 09 March 1688. MORE ONMELLAN AT ART4MAY with links to images.
