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Tait Peter Guthrie (b. 1831-04-28 / d. 1901-07-04)
Peter Guthrie Tait FRSE was a Scottish mathematical physicist and early pioneer in thermodynamics. He is best known for the mathematical physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which he co-wrote with Kelvin, and his early investigations into knot theory. His work on knot theory contributed to the eventual formation of topology as a mathematical discipline. His name is known in graph theory mainly for Tait's conjecture. He is also one of the namesakes of the Tait-Kneser theorem on osculating circles.
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82
Born 1818-10-18. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Age
Friedrich Eduard Hoffmann was a Berlin architect and inventor, born on October 18, 1818 in Gröningen and died on December 3, 1900. He developed the continuous fire oven called "Hoffmann oven".
46
Born 1854-10-16. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Infection
Wilde made a complaint of criminal libel against Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, for leaving him a calling card at his club. The offending card read "For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite [sic]". The Marquess was arrested and later freed on bail.
The Marqueese decided to counter-attack.
On May 25, 1895 Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years' hard labour. His conviction angered some observers, one of whom demanded, in a published letter, "Why does not the Crown prosecute every boy at a public or private school or half the men in the Universities?" in reference to the presumed pederastic proclivities of English upper class men.
Prison was unkind to Wilde's health and after he was released on May 19, 1897 he spent his last three years penniless, in self-imposed exile from society and artistic circles. He went under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth, after the famously "penetrated" Saint Sebastian and the devilish central character of Wilde's great-uncle Charles Robert Maturin's gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer.
Wilde died of cerebral meningitis. Different opinions are given on the cause of the meningitis; Richard Ellmann claimed it was syphilitic; Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, thought this to be a misconception, noting that Wilde's meningitis followed a surgical intervention, perhaps a mastoidectomy; Wilde's physicians, Dr. Paul Cleiss and A'Court Tucker, reported that the condition stemmed from an old suppuration of the right ear (une ancienne suppuration de l'oreille droite d'ailleurs en traitement depuis plusieurs années) and did not allude to syphilis. Most modern scholars and doctors agree that syphilis was unlikely to have been the cause of his death.
71
Born 1829-12-27. Domain:Painting. Cause of death:Age
He was a French painter in the academic style. His daughter Laura Leroux was also a painter.
48
Born 1852-10-06. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Unknown
Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz was a Polish mathematician, inventor, and electrical engineer. He invented the integraph, a form of the integrator, which was patented in 1880, and was henceforth produced by the Swiss firm Coradi. Among his other patents were the parabolagraph, the spirograph, the electric bell used in trains, and an electric arc lamp of his own design. Abakanowicz published several works, including works on statistics, integrators and numerous popular scientific works, such as one describing his integraph. He was also hired by the French government as an expert on electrification and was the main engineer behind the electrification of, among other places, the city of Lyon. His patents allowed him to become a wealthy man and made him receive the Legion d'Honneur in 1889. Around that time he retired to a small island in Trégastel, off the coast of Brittany, where between 1892 and 1896 he erected a neo-Gothic manor. Although the construction works were not finished in Abakanowicz's lifetime, the castle of Costaérès became a notable centre of Polish emigree culture, housing many notable artists, scientists and politicians. Among frequent guests of Abakanowicz were Aleksander Gierymski, Władysław Mickiewicz, Leon Wyczółkowski and Henryk Sienkiewicz. Bruno Abakanowicz died suddenly on 29 August 1900. In his will, he made Sienkiewicz the tutor of his sole daughter Zofia, who later graduated from the London School of Economics and the Sorbonne and was murdered during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
56
Born 1844-10-15. Domain:Philosophy. Cause of death:Stroke
His style, and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, raise considerable problems of interpretation, generating an extensive secondary literature in both continental and analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, his key ideas include interpreting tragedy as an affirmation of life, an eternal recurrence that has become subject to numerous interpretations, a reversal of Platonism, and a repudiation of (especially 19th-century) Christianity.
Commentators have frequently diagnosed a syphilitic infection as the cause of the illness. While most commentators regard Nietzsche's breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille and René Girard, argue that his breakdown may have been caused by a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy.
In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered from at least two strokes which partially paralysed him and left him unable to speak or walk.
After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of August 24 / August 25, and then died about noon on August 25.
42
Born 1858-04-03. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Infection (Lungs)
He was a French poet and writer of the Symbolist school. Samain died of tuberculosis.
78
Born 1822-01-12. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Age
He was a Belgian engineer who developed the internal combustion engine in 1859. Prior designs for such engines were patented as early as 1807, but none were commercially successful. Lenoir's engine was commercialized in sufficient quantities to be considered a success, a first for the internal combustion engine.
81
Born 1819-03-17. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Age
On 21 June, 1859, Dagron was granted the first microfilm patent in history.
84
Born 1816-02-07. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Jean Frédéric Frenet was a French mathematician, astronomer, and meteorologist. He was born and died in Périgueux, France. He is best known for being an independent co-discoverer of the Frenet–Serret formulas. He wrote six out of the nine formulas, which at that time were not expressed in vector notation. These formulas are important in the theory of space curves (differential geometry), and they were presented in his doctoral thesis at Toulouse in 1847. That year he became a professor at Toulouse, and one year later, 1848, he became professor of mathematics at Lyon. He also was director of an astronomical observatory at Lyon. Four years later, in 1852, he published the Frenet formulas in the Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées.
69
Born 1831-09-07. Domain:Sculpting. Cause of death:Unknown
His Triumph of the Republic (1881-1886), a vast quadriga for the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, is perhaps more amazingly full of life than others of his works, all of which reveal this quality of vitality in superlative degree.
78
Born 1822-03-11. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Joseph Louis François Bertrand was a French mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory, differential geometry, probability theory, economics and thermodynamics. Bertrand translated into French Carl Friedrich Gauss's work on the theory of errors and the method of least squares.
66
Born 1834-03-17. Domain:Business. Cause of death:Age
He was an engineer, industrial designer and industrialist, born in Schorndorf (Kingdom of Württemberg, a federal state of the German Confederation), in what is now Germany. He was a pioneer of internal-combustion engines and automobile development. He invented the first high-speed petrol engine and the first four-wheel automobile.
65
Born 1835-11-16. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Eugenio Beltrami was an Italian mathematician notable for his work concerning differential geometry and mathematical physics. His work was noted especially for clarity of exposition. He was the first to prove consistency of non-Euclidean geometry by modeling it on a surface of constant curvature, the pseudosphere, and in the interior of an n-dimensional unit sphere, the so-called Beltrami–Klein model. He also developed singular value decomposition for matrices, which has been subsequently rediscovered several times. Beltrami's use of differential calculus for problems of mathematical physics indirectly influenced development of tensor calculus by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita.