Hacker calendar

Kragen Javier Sitaker, 02020-06-28 (updated 02020-12-03) (15 minutes)

The humans like to memorialize dates by holding annual celebrations. What kinds of dates would a hacker culture memorialize?

I’m putting together a date table here in a sort of cuckoo-hash fashion: most dates commemorate individual hackers, and for most of the hackers the relevant known dates are their birthdate and their death date. When there is a collision, I can usually move the person in question to a different relevant date: their death date if they’re listed at their birthdate, or vice versa.

So, for example, to insert Laplace, Hao Wang moved from May 20 to May 13, allowing Jean Sammet to move from March 23 to May 20, freeing up March 23 for Laplace. Laplace’s death date, March 5, was occupied by William Oughtred, who died June 30, which is already quite full with two difficult-to-move events: the feast of Ramon Llull and the release of OpenGL.

  1. January 1, 1992: Grace Hopper died (born December 9, 1906)
  2. January 4, 1643 (O.S. December 25, 1642): Newton born; died March 31, 1727 (O.S. March 20, 1726), published Principia July 5, 1687?
  3. January 8, 1642: Galileo Galilei died after 8.5 years of house arrest (born February 15, 1564, sentenced by the Inquisition June 22, 1633(?))
  4. January 11, 2013: Aaron Hillel Swartz committed suicide to escape government persecution (born November 8, 1986)
  5. January 14, 1901: Tarski born (died October 26, 1983)
  6. January 15, 2001: the founding of Wikipedia
  7. January 19, 1912: Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich (Леони́д Вита́льевич Канторо́вич) born (died April 7, 1986). Published “Математические методы организации и планирования производства” in 1939.
  8. February 7, 1990: Alan Perlis died (born April 1, 1922)
  9. Feburary 8, 1920: Bob Bemer born (died June 22, 2004)
  10. February 11, 1897: Emil Post born (died April 21, 1954)
  11. February 13, 1258: the destruction of the House of Wisdom (بيت الحكمة‎) by Mongol soldiers in the Siege of Baghdad (though that was only the first day of a week of destruction)
  12. February 17, 1600: Giordano Bruno, who first proposed that the stars were distant suns, burned at the stake for, among other things, teaching reincarnation and possessing the writings of Erasmus.
  13. February 23, 1855: Gauss died (born April 30, 1777)
  14. February 24, 1709: Jacques de Vaucanson born (died November 2, 1782)
  15. March 1, 1990: the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games for publishing GURPS Cyberpunk
  16. March 1, 86 BCE: Sulla sacked Athens, having burned Plato’s Academy. (However, this needs to be corrected for calendar alignment.)
  17. March 4, 1959: John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927; died October 24, 2011) published Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 8, “Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine”, describing the LISP language he and Steve “Slug” Russell (born 1937, still alive) had developed on the 704.
  18. March 5, 1574: William Oughtred born (died June 30, 1660)
  19. March 7, 1917: Betty Holberton born (died December 8, 2001)
  20. March 11, 1890: Vannevar Bush born (died June 28, 1974)
  21. March 18, 1905: Einstein sends his paper on the photoelectric effect, for which he received the Nobel Prize, to Annalen der Physik, which published it on June 9. Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, and died on April 18, 1955. In his annus mirabilis 1905, he published relativity and some other stuff, including his thesis (April 30). Annalen der Physik received the relativity paper on June 30 and published it September 26.
  22. March 20, 1956: Kurt Gödel (born April 28, 1906, died January 14, 1978) wrote to John von Neumann, posing essentially the P vs. NP problem
  23. March 21, 1768: Fourier born (or, alternatively, December 21, 1807, he presented his paper “on the propagation of heat in solid bodies”)
  24. March 23, 1749: Laplace born (died March 5, 1827); published Bayesian probability theory in 1812
  25. March 25, 1914: Norman Borlaug born, who saved a billion lives with dwarf wheat (died September 12, 2009)
  26. March 31, 1596: Descartes’ birth (died February 11, 1650)
  27. April 7, 1761: Thomas Bayes died (birthdate unknown)
  28. April 9, 1806: Isambard Kingdom Brunel born (died September 15, 1859)
  29. April 14, 1935: Emmy Noether died (born March 23, 1882)
  30. April 15, 1707: Euler born (died September 18, 1783)
  31. April 25, 1903: Kolmogorov born (died October 20, 1987)
  32. April 26, 1920: the death of Srinivasa Ramanujan (born December 22, 1887)
  33. April 29, 1911: founding of Tsinghua University (then 清華學堂, now 清华大学)
  34. April 30, 1995: the NSFNet backbone shut down, ending the NSFNet Acceptable Use Policy which prohibited most for-profit activity on most of the internet.
  35. April 30, 1916: Claude Shannon born (died February 24, 2001) (Shannon Day was celebrated April 30, 2016)
  36. May 2, 1519: Leonardo da Vinci died (born April 14 or 15, 1452)
  37. May 7, 1711 (O.S. April 26): David Hume born. (Died August 25, 1776)
  38. May 10, 1933: nationwide book burning by Nazis, following the German “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”, which on April 7, 1933 eliminated all Jewish and Communist public employees, including professors, with some exceptions;
  39. May 11, 1918: Richard Feynman born (died February 15, 1988)
  40. May 13, 1995: Hao Wang (王浩) died (born May 20, 1921)
  41. May 17, 1902: the discovery that the Antikythera Mechanism had gears (probably brought up July 1901)
  42. May 20, 2017: Jean E. Sammet died (born March 23, 1928)
  43. May 31, 1832: Évariste Galois killed in a duel (born October 25, 1811)
  44. June 7, 1954: Alan Turing committed suicide (born June 23, 1912)
  45. June 9, 597: St. Columba died (born December 7, 521). Legend has it he fought the battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561 to defend his right to copy St. Finnian’s psalter.
  46. June 16, 1915: John Tukey born (died July 26, 2000)
  47. June 22, 1910: Konrad Zuse born (died December 18, 1995)
  48. June 27, 1831: Sophie Germain (Monsieur Antoine-Auguste Leblanc) died
  49. June 28: Tau Day
  50. June 30, 1992: OpenGL released
  51. June 30, feast day of Ramon Llull, whose works were prohibited by the Spanish Inquisition (traditional death date June 29)
  52. July 1, 1646: Leibniz’s birth in Leipzig (O.S. June 21) (died November 14, 1716)
  53. July 10, 1856: Nikola Tesla (Никола Тесла) born (died January 7, 1943)
  54. July 16, 1945: the Trinity event
  55. July 17, 1912: Poincaré died (born April 29, 1854)
  56. July 20, 1969: Apollo 11 lands humans on the moon for the first time at 20:17 UTC
  57. July 25, 1926: Ray Solomonoff born (died December 7, 2009)
  58. August 6, 2002: Dijkstra died (born May 11, 1930)
  59. August 8, 1900: David Hilbert (born January 23, 1862; died February 14, 1943) presents ten of his 23 famous problems at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris.
  60. August 9, 1927: Marvin Minsky born (died January 24, 2016)
  61. August 12, 2013: Warren Teitelman died (born 1941)
  62. August 17, 2004: Xiaoyun Wang (王小云), Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai, and Hongbo Yu of Shandong University published their break of MD5.
  63. September 5, 1977: launch of Voyager 1, omitting “Here Comes the Sun” for copyright reasons
  64. September 9, 1941: Dennis Ritchie born (died October 12, 2011)
  65. September 17, 1826: Riemann born
  66. September 26, 1983: Stanislav Yefgravovich Petrov (born September 7, 1939; died May 19, 2017) refused to nuke the US when a radar system malfunctioned, thus saving human civilization
  67. September 27, 1983: The inauguration of the GNU Project
  68. September 30, 1993: WSMR-SIMTEL20, one of the greatest libraries of software in the world, was shut down at 1600 hours Mountain Daylight Time and its 165,000 files destroyed, following a copyright lawsuit from the Louis E. Wheeler Co., as reported in Network World, January 16, 1995 (“Army gets caught in software piracy firestorm”).
  69. October 4, 1957: launch of Sputnik 1
  70. October 18, 1931: Thomas Edison died (born February 11, 1847)
  71. October 29, 1998: the sale of the Archimedes Palimpsest
  72. the fourth month of the inundation season: when Ahmose wrote the Rhind Papyrus
  73. October 30, 1961: Tsar Bomba test
  74. October 31: octal Newtonmas — oct 31 = dec 25
  75. November 2, 1988: the helminthiasis of the internet with the Morris worm
  76. November 6, 1717: J. S. Bach imprisoned (or March 31, 1685: J. S. Bach born, or July 28, 1750, Bach died (Episcopal feast day))
  77. November 8, 1848: Gottlob Frege born (died July 26, 1925; published the Begriffsschrift in 1879) although he was an anti-Semite
  78. November 11, 1918: 11:00: Armistice Day
  79. November 19, 2020: USA's National Science Foundation decides to demolish the Arecibo Observatory, the largest single-reflector telescope until 2016, and crucial to predicting asteroid impacts; it was irreparable and collapsing after being damaged in hurricanes over previous years, following decades of decay. It was built 1960–63.
  80. November 26, 1894: Norbert Wiener born (died March 18, 1964)
  81. November 30, 1858: Jagadish Chandra Bose, who invented semiconductor diodes and submillimeter light, born (died November 23, 1937)
  82. December 1, 1975: the publication of the first version of Scheme as the paper “Scheme: an interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus”, 1975, AIM-349
  83. December 7, 1873: Cantor sends Dedekind his proof of the uncountability of the reals
  84. December 8, 1864: George Boole died (born November 2, 1815)
  85. December 9, 1968: Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos (born January 30, 1925; died July 2, 2013)
  86. December 10, 1815: Augusta Ada Byron (later Lovelace) born (died November 27, 1852). In September 1843 her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s 1842 French notes on Babbage (born 1791)’s Analytical Engine were published in Scientific Memoirs, including the first computer program in Note G of its “notes by the translator”; translated into C by Sinclair Target in 2018
  87. December 17, 1706: Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, who arguably discovered energy, was born (died September 10, 1749)
  88. December 23, 1790: Jean-François Champollion born (died March 4, 1832), deciphered the Egyptian demotic script in 1806 and, while awaiting trial for treason, the hieroglyphs in 1822.
  89. December 28, 1903: John von Neumann born (died February 8, 1957)

Things I don’t know dates of:

  1. Lu Ban (魯班) (dates unknown)
  2. Shandong University 山东大学 founded (dates unknown)
  3. Zhang Heng (張衡) (dates unknown)
  4. Su Song (蘇頌) (dates unknown)
  5. Guo Shoujing (郭守敬) (dates unknown)
  6. Sunshu Ao (孫叔敖) (dates unknown)
  7. Shen Kuo (沈括) (dates unknown)
  8. Yī Xíng (一行) (dates unknown)
  9. Liu Hui (劉徽) (dates unknown)
  10. Mozi (墨子) (dates unknown)
  11. Zu Chongzhi (祖沖之) (dates unknown)
  12. Heron of Alexandria (dates unknown)
  13. Eudoxus of Cnidus (dates unknown) (when was his eclipse?)
  14. Dakṣiputra Pāṇini (dates unknown)
  15. Akṣapāda Gautama (dates unknown)
  16. Ahmad, Muhammad and Hasan bin Musa ibn Shakir, the Banu Musa who wrote the كتاب الحيل Kitab al-Hiyal (dates unknown) in the House of Wisdom
  17. the first solar power plant entered production in Egypt (Frank Shuman’s “Solar Engine One” in Maadi, 1912-1913)
  18. Chomsky hierarchy? https://doi.org/10.1016%2FS0019-9958%2859%2990362-6 1959 “On certain formal properties of grammars” (though Chomsky himself is still alive)
  19. Aristotle (dates unknown)
  20. Brahmagupta (dates unknown)
  21. Something about Knuth? The publication date of TAOCP volume 1?
  22. Stephen A. Cook’s SAT paper establishing NP-completeness? http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sacook/homepage/1971.pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.406.395
  23. something to memorialize the Mohists and the other scholars who fell to Qin Shi Huang?
  24. something to memorialize the Library of Alexandria?
  25. something to celebrate Euclid
  26. al-Khwarizmi’s book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compendious_Book_on_Calculation_by_Completion_and_Balancing?
  27. something to celebrate Aryabhata and the Aryabhatiya?
  28. publication of the break of Merkle’s knapsack algorithm (date unknown)
  29. something about the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art
  30. the release of the first version of Haskell (dates unknown)
  31. July 1562: the burning of the Maya codices by Bishop Diego de Landa (date unknown)
  32. the publication of Alice in Wonderland
  33. the founding of Sun
  34. the going on sale of the Altair 8800
  35. founding of the University of Leipzig
  36. burning of the last copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia
  37. Cornelis Drebben
  38. Jaquet Droz?
  39. Inauguration of the EDVAC?
  40. Alexander Humboldt?
  41. the defeat of Kasparov
  42. something about Prometheus
  43. the rescue of the library of Timbuktu
  44. Mozart?
  45. Haskell released
  46. THERAC-25
  47. Ariane 5
  48. Chernobyl
  49. Lavoisier’s execution
  50. Linux announced
  51. 4.4BSD-Lite released
  52. Jean Bartik? May have made ENIAC a stored-program computer.
  53. Kalashnikov?
  54. April 1962: Spacewar!
  55. James Watt?
  56. the Cultural Revolution
  57. McCarthyism
  58. Alonzo Church?
  59. Ctesibius?
  60. Genesis Block mined?
  61. Morse’s first telegraph message sent?
  62. Santos Dumont’s first flight?
  63. Fred Fish?

Of secondary importance:

Rejected:

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