Today in history @ 11 March

Famous birthdays

a. Former Indian cricket captain Vijay Hazare (b. 1915). He has been honoured with a trophy in his name, the Vijay Hazare Trophy, a zonal-cricket tournament in India.

b. American engineer, inventor and science administrator, Vanevar Bush (b. 1890) who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project.

Bush is also remembered as a prophet in another field, computer science. In a 1945 article entitled “As We May Think,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, Bush proposed a device that he called the Memex—an indexed, archival, microfilm machine for cross-referencing and retrieving information. For Bush, this article was an extension of his work in analog computing and microfilm technology. To the modern reader it portends the creation of hypertext and the World Wide Web.

c. Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate (1981 for Physics) Nicolaas Bloembergen (b. 1920). He is recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy.

d. J C R Licklider (b. 1915) was an American psychologist and computer scientist. He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. He did much to initiate this by funding research which led to much of it, including today's canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet.

e. American physician, researcher, and expert on organ transplants Thomas Starzi (b. 1926). He performed the first human liver transplants, and has often been referred to as "the father of modern transplantation.

f. Massachusetts lawyer and politician Robert Treat Paine (b. 1731). He is best known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence as a representative of Massachusetts. He served as the state's first attorney general, and served as an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court.

g. French mathematician Urbaine Le Verrier (b. 1811). He specialized in celestial mechanics and is best known for predicting the existence and position of Neptune using only mathematics. The discovery of Neptune is widely regarded as a dramatic validation of celestial mechanics, and is one of the most remarkable moments of 19th-century science.

h. French mathematician Louis Bachelier (b. 1870). Bachelier’s Doctoral thesis, which introduced for the first time a mathematical model of Brownian motion and its use for valuing stock options, is historically the first paper to use advanced mathematics in the study of finance. Thus, Bachelier is considered as the forefather of mathematical finance and a pioneer in the study of stochastic processes.

i. Australian-born American media mogul Rupert Mudroch (b. 1931). He is the founder and head of News Corporation, a global media conglomerate. He created Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986.

j. Two times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976), Harold Wilson (b. 1916).

Famous death anniversaries

a. Scottish physician, microbiologist, and pharmacologist Sir Alexander Fleming (d. 1955). His best-known discoveries are the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the world's first antibiotic substance benzylpenicillin (Penicillin G) from the mould Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. Fleming was knighted for his scientific achievements in 1944. In 1999, he was named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century.

b. Swedish mathematician Helge Koch (d. 1924) who gave his name to the famous fractal known as the Koch snowflake, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described.