781 – The earliest recorded eruption of Japan’s Mount Fuji takes place.
Mount Fuji is an attractive volcanic cone and a frequent subject of Japanese art especially after 1600, when Edo (now Tokyo) became the capital and people saw the mountain while traveling on the Tōkaidō road. The mountain is mentioned in Japanese literature throughout the ages and is the subject of many poems.[15] One of the modern artists who depicted Fuji in almost all her works was Tamako Kataoka.
It is thought that the first recorded ascent was in 663 by an anonymous monk.[citation needed] The summit has been thought of as sacred since ancient times and was forbidden to women until the Meiji Era in the late 1860s. Ancient samurai used the base of the mountain as a remote training area, near the present-day town of Gotemba. The shōgun Minamoto no Yoritomo held yabusame in the area in the early Kamakura period.
1703 – English author Daniel Defoe is convicted of seditious libel after publishing a satire and placed in a pillory for punishment. He’s, however, pelted with flowers.
Defoe was a natural target, and his pamphleteering and political activities resulted in his arrest and placement in a pillory on 31 July 1703, principally on account of his December 1702 pamphlet entitled The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church, purporting to argue for their extermination.[18] In it, he ruthlessly satirised both the High church Tories and those Dissenters who hypocritically practised so-called “occasional conformity”, such as his Stoke Newington neighbour Sir Thomas Abney. It was published anonymously, but the true authorship was quickly discovered and Defoe was arrested.[11] He was charged with seditious libel. Defoe was found guilty after a trial at the Old Bailey in front of the notoriously sadistic judge Salathiel Lovell. Lovell sentenced him to a punitive fine of 200 marks, to public humiliation in a pillory, and to an indeterminate length of imprisonment which would only end upon the discharge of the punitive fine.[7] According to legend, the publication of his poem Hymn to the Pillory caused his audience at the pillory to throw flowers instead of the customary harmful and noxious objects and to drink to his health. The truth of this story is questioned by most scholars, although John Robert Moore later said that “no man in England but Defoe ever stood in the pillory and later rose to eminence among his fellow men”.
1858 – Swiss-American educator Marion Talbot is born.
Talbot was born in Thun, Switzerland, while her parents were on a long European trip, but grew up in Boston. She was the eldest of six children born to Emily Fairbanks Talbot and Israel Talbot, who was dean of the Boston University School of Medicine. Her mother was an activist and former teacher; the paucity of college preparatory opportunities for her daughters led her to work to establish the Boston Latin Academy, the first all-girls’ college preparatory academy in the United States.
Talbot herself, however, was the eldest and did not benefit from that effort directly;[4] she attended the Chapel Hill – Chauncy Hall School near Boston, and subsequently attended Boston University, where her other had to work aggressively to secure her admission. Talbot earned an AB there in 1880 and an AM in 1882.[1] She additionally obtained an BS from MIT, where she studied under domestic science pioneer Ellen Swallow Richards, who had established her own laboratory there. Talbot initially dropped out due to poor conditions for women at MIT, but completed the degree in 1888.
1919 – Italian chemist and Holocaust writer Primo Levi is born.
via NYTimes Archives:
Primo Levi, whose autobiographical writings drew on his experiences as an Auschwitz survivor and his training as a chemist, died today in Turin. He was 67 years old.
The authorities said they were treating the death as a suicide. Mr. Levi was found by members of his family and neighbors at the foot of a stairwell in the home where he was born, in the Crocetta neighborhood, and he was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.
Renzo Levi, the writer’s son, said by telephone from Turin that his father had had serious bouts of depression in recent months.
The elder Mr. Levi had undergone minor surgery recently, and friends suggested he was deeply troubled about the condition of his 92-year-old mother, who was partially paralyzed by a stroke last year.
1926 – American computer scientist Hilary Putnam is born.
Putnam has contributed to scientific fields not directly related to his work in philosophy. As a mathematician, Putnam contributed to the resolution of Hilbert’s tenth problem in mathematics. This problem was settled by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970, with a proof that relied heavily on previous research by Putnam, Julia Robinson and Martin Davis.
In computability theory, Putnam investigated the structure of the ramified analytical hierarchy, its connection with the constructible hierarchy and its Turing degrees. He showed that there exist many levels of the constructible hierarchy which do not add any subsets of the integers and later, with his student George Boolos, that the first such “non-index” is the ordinal {\displaystyle \beta _{0}} \beta _{0} of ramified analysis (this is the smallest {\displaystyle \beta } \beta such that {\displaystyle L_{\beta }} L_{\beta } is a model of full second-order comprehension), and also, together with a separate paper with Richard Boyd (another of Putnam’s students) and Gustav Hensel,[56] how the Davis–Mostowski–Kleene hyperarithmetical hierarchy of arithmetical degrees can be naturally extended up to {\displaystyle \beta _{0}} \beta _{0}.
In computer science, Putnam is known for the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), developed with Martin Davis in 1960. The algorithm finds if there is a set of true or false values that satisfies a given Boolean expression so that the entire expression becomes true. In 1962, they further refined the algorithm with the help of George Logemann and Donald W. Loveland. It became known as the DPLL algorithm. This algorithm is efficient and still forms the basis of most complete SAT solvers.
1964 – The American space probe Ranger 7 transmits pictures of the moon’s surface.
via NYTimes archives:
Ranger 7 radioed to earth today the first close-up pictures of the moon- a historic collection of 4,000 pictures one thousand times as clear as anything ever seen through earth-bound telescopes.
Scientists here were hailing the achievement, which exceeded all expectations, as by far the greatest advance in lunar astronomy since Galileo.
They said the pictures not only represented a great leap in man’s knowledge of the moon, but also, on a more practical level, lent encouragement that the lunar surface was suitable for Project Apollo’s manned lunar landings.
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