Fourier was a French mathematician and Egyptologist. As an engineer on the Egyptian expedition led by Napoleon—who later made him a baron—he conducted anthropological investigations and wrote the preface to the monumental Description de l’Égypte, whose publication he oversaw. In mathematics, he is primarily known for his work in heat conduction and for his use of the Fourier series to solve differential equations. Whom did Fourier inspire to study Egyptology? Discuss
Category: Today’s Birthday
Henrik Ibsen (1828)
Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright, is considered the father of modern theater. Emphasizing character over plot, he explored psychological conflicts stemming from frustrated love and destructive family relationships, and he addressed social problems such as political corruption and the changing role of women. Many considered his plays scandalous, but he earned a worldwide audience with powerful studies of middle-class morality, such as A Doll’s House. What, allegedly, were Ibsen’s last words? Discuss
Wyatt Earp (1848)
Earp was an American frontiersman. In the 1870s, he worked as a police officer in Wichita and Dodge City, Kansas, where he befriended gunmen Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson. He later worked as a guard for Wells, Fargo & Company. By 1881, he had moved to Tombstone, Arizona, living as a gambler and a saloon guard. His brother Virgil became town marshal, and his other brothers bought real estate and businesses. A feud with the Clanton gang ended in a shootout at the O.K. Corral, where what happened? Discuss
Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll (1848)
In 1840, Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and the two had nine children, whose marriages, and those of their grandchildren, in turn, allied the British royal house with those of Russia, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Romania, and others. Their sixth child, Princess Louise, is regarded by biographers as the couple’s most beautiful daughter. In 1871, Louise married the Marquess of Lorne and became the Duchess of Argyll. Why was the marriage controversial? Discuss
John Wayne Gacy (1942)
Gacy was an American serial killer who was convicted and later executed for murdering 33 boys and young men between 1972 and 1978. Gacy buried dozens of his victims in a crawl space under the floor of his house and threw several others in a nearby river. Known as the “Killer Clown,” he often performed as a clown at local parties and even had drinks at a local bar while in costume on a few occasions. Gacy took up painting while on death row. What motif appeared in many of his art works? Discuss
Luis Ernesto Miramontes Cárdenas (1925)
Miramontes was a Mexican chemist whose extensive scientific contributions include numerous publications and nearly 40 national and international patents in different areas, including organic chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, petrochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, and polluting agents. However, Miramontes is best remembered for his synthesis, in 1951, of norethindrone, a progestational hormone that would be used as the base of one of the first forms of what? Discuss
Fabio Lanzoni (1959)
Widely known simply as Fabio, Lanzoni is an Italian male fashion model and actor who became famous for appearing on the covers of hundreds of romance novels throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He has also written romance novels, including Pirate and Comanche, and is said to be the first best-selling male romance writer to publish under his own name rather than a pseudonym. Lanzoni has appeared in a number of commercials for a range of different products, and he has acted in what films? Discuss
Doris Eaton Travis (1904)
Travis was a Broadway and film performer who began her career at the age of 14 by joining the Ziegfeld Follies, the long-running annual Broadway revue famous for its extraordinarily elaborate theatrical productions and chorus of beautiful women, known as the Ziegfeld Girls after the show’s producer. Travis, who became one of the stars of the revue, lived to the age of 106 and was the last surviving Ziegfeld Girl. What did she do in the 74 years after her show-business career ended? Discuss
Percival Lowell (1855)
Lowell was an astronomer who built a private observatory in Arizona to study Mars and championed the idea that intelligent inhabitants of the Red Planet had constructed a planetwide system of irrigation there. He believed that the so-called canals of Mars were bands of cultivated vegetation dependent on this irrigation. His theory, long vigorously opposed, was finally put to rest by images taken by the US Mariner spacecrafts. Lowell did, however, correctly predict the existence of what “planet”? Discuss
Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832)
Boycott was the estate agent for the Earl of Erne, an absentee landowner in County Mayo, Ireland, at a time when the Irish Land League was pressing for agrarian reform. In 1880, Boycott’s refusal to reduce rents for tenant farmers, combined with his attempted eviction of 11 of them, led the League to launch a campaign of ostracism and isolation—now known as a “boycott”—against him and his family. Upon finding himself suddenly without servants, farmhands, or local services, Boycott did what? Discuss