#histsci — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #histsci, aggregated by home.social.
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A man dyed his pigeons pastel, kept a giraffe, and once sold two fictional elephants via The Times, leaving Harold Nicolson to spend a day denying he'd bought one. That man was Lord Berners, Britain's most committed eccentric composer.
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Rhâ zut, j'ai raté ça...
https://cosmospectio.hypotheses.org/5883 #histsci #pastagenda -
Colonists declared him a patron saint. They wore bucktail hats and gave the whoop. Washington threw his feast day at Valley Forge while troops starved. His name ended up on Boss Tweed's desk. Tamanend just offered Penn some acorns.
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14-May: On this day in 1856, after almost 20 years exploring the subject, Charles Darwin finally began to write up his ideas on the evolution of species for publication. But events were to overtake him…
https://friendsofdarwin.com/articles/big-species-book/
#HistSci -
For 30 years, a man in 60 pounds of leather walked a 365-mile loop through Connecticut and New York every 34 days. Ten towns changed their laws for him. They opened his grave in 2011 and found only an outline. They called him the Leatherman.
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Happy birthday to Danish #seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888 – 1993) who demonstrated that the Earth’s core is not a single molten sphere, but contained an inner solid core, in ‘36. She was a pioneer #womanInScience, a brilliant seismologist & lived to be 105.
As she first postulated, the earth has roughly 3 equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core & solid inner core. 🧵 -
Happy birthday to Danish #seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888 – 1993) who demonstrated that the Earth’s core is not a single molten sphere, but contained an inner solid core, in ‘36. She was a pioneer #womanInScience, a brilliant seismologist & lived to be 105.
As she first postulated, the earth has roughly 3 equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core & solid inner core. 🧵 -
Happy birthday to Danish #seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888 – 1993) who demonstrated that the Earth’s core is not a single molten sphere, but contained an inner solid core, in ‘36. She was a pioneer #womanInScience, a brilliant seismologist & lived to be 105.
As she first postulated, the earth has roughly 3 equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core & solid inner core. 🧵 -
Happy birthday to Danish #seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888 – 1993) who demonstrated that the Earth’s core is not a single molten sphere, but contained an inner solid core, in ‘36. She was a pioneer #womanInScience, a brilliant seismologist & lived to be 105.
As she first postulated, the earth has roughly 3 equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core & solid inner core. 🧵 -
Happy birthday to Danish #seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888 – 1993) who demonstrated that the Earth’s core is not a single molten sphere, but contained an inner solid core, in ‘36. She was a pioneer #womanInScience, a brilliant seismologist & lived to be 105.
As she first postulated, the earth has roughly 3 equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core & solid inner core. 🧵 -
Societies tell stories about what diseases are. In the wonderful EVERYTHING IS TUBERCULOSIS, @[email protected] writes: “The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us.” 1/ 💙📚 🧪🗃 #histsci #histmed
"Everything is Tuberculosis" a... -
A Victorian woman painted 350 fungi, germinated spores decades before formal science caught up, and got dismissed by Kew Gardens as delusional. She giggled, went home, and drew a rabbit in a blue jacket. Beatrix Potter: spurned mycologist.
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Happy birthday to #mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)! The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious #math awards, is awarded to mathematicians < 40. In 2014, she became 1st woman to win. Her research included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, & symplectic geometry, and Fields committee cited her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.
🧵1/
#sciart #mathart #linocut #printmaking #womeninSTEM #histsci -
Happy birthday to #mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)! The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious #math awards, is awarded to mathematicians < 40. In 2014, she became 1st woman to win. Her research included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, & symplectic geometry, and Fields committee cited her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.
🧵1/
#sciart #mathart #linocut #printmaking #womeninSTEM #histsci -
Happy birthday to #mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)! The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious #math awards, is awarded to mathematicians < 40. In 2014, she became 1st woman to win. Her research included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, & symplectic geometry, and Fields committee cited her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.
🧵1/
#sciart #mathart #linocut #printmaking #womeninSTEM #histsci -
Happy birthday to #mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)! The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious #math awards, is awarded to mathematicians < 40. In 2014, she became 1st woman to win. Her research included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, & symplectic geometry, and Fields committee cited her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.
🧵1/
#sciart #mathart #linocut #printmaking #womeninSTEM #histsci -
Happy birthday to #mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)! The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious #math awards, is awarded to mathematicians < 40. In 2014, she became 1st woman to win. Her research included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, & symplectic geometry, and Fields committee cited her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.
🧵1/
#sciart #mathart #linocut #printmaking #womeninSTEM #histsci -
A folding chair, fourteen inches high, held together with duct tape and piano wire. The seat had worn clean through. From its bare frame came some of the most controlled recordings ever made. It now sits in a glass case in Canada. It belonged to Glenn Gould.
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Spoke six languages, improved diamonds for a king, and claimed to be three hundred years old. His valet couldn’t confirm — only five hundred years of service. The Comte de Saint-Germain, most sought-after guest in Europe, was buried for free.
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A math textbook edited around 364 AD quietly became the standard edition for fourteen centuries. Copernicus used it. Newton used it. Nobody noticed until 1808. The editor was Hypatia of Alexandria, last great scholar of the ancient world.
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Napoleon's toothbrush. Darwin's walking stick. Shrunken heads. 12,000 packing cases stored between a tannery and an anchovy factory. Sir Henry Wellcome: pharmaceutical king, compulsive acquirer, patron saint of unsorted crates.
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A brass disc worth threepence stopped Merlin engines from cutting dead mid-dive. A plumbing fixtures company mass-produced it. Its inventor rode a Norton from airfield to airfield, fitting 93 in a week. Her name was Beatrice Shilling. They called her a plumber.
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Making an astronomer portrait with a juicy rainbow roll 🌈
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A mother banned poetry from her daughter's life. Filled the house with logic, science, parallelograms. It worked — the girl wrote the first computer program a century early. Then she quietly wrote a sonnet. Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Number, buried beside Byron.
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Today is 167 years since the death of #AlexanderVonHumboldt. This admirably concise biography offers a factual and nuanced picture of his life and work, and critically interrogates previous portrayals.
https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2025/02/11/book-review-alexander-von-humboldt-a-concise-biography/
#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Biography #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Scicomm @princetonupress @princetonnature
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A bureaucrat quit his job managing pipes, moved into a riverside hut, and named himself after a useless banana tree. Then he wrote seventeen syllables about a frog hitting water — the most translated poem in Japanese history. His name was Matsuo Bashō.
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It took 105 wagons to move one man's library and they still left rooms of books behind. The auction to sell it started in 1891 and finished in 2006. Some crates had never been opened. Sir Thomas Phillipps, baronet, bibliomaniac, sofa sleeper.
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03-May: On this day in 1859, the first reviewer of (the as-yet-unpublished) ‘On the Origin of Species’, Rev. Whitwell Elwin, politely suggested Darwin might do better writing a book about pigeons! Here’s the story…
https://friendsofdarwin.com/articles/whitwell-elwin/
#HistSci -
Born blind, enslaved, and autistic with a 100-word vocabulary and 7,000 memorized pieces. Played challengers' mistakes back at them — same hesitation, same stumble. Mirrored one woman's body so precisely she fled the theater. Thomas Wiggins, highest-paid pianist in America.
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Around 994 a woman ranked silver tweezers alongside the impossibility of lasting love, filed pear blossoms under "most vulgar," and liked everything that cries in the night — except babies. Sei Shōnagon, history's first great essayist and deadpan list-maker.
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Also challenges the gendered associations of knotting and knitting by showing how such practices inspired Scottish male mathematicians like Tait, Maxwell and Thomson #hps #histsci
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:l4dcuxn3os2bmxt72dv3qwrq/post/3mk3wa3j5sk25 -
Time for a new edition of Canadian biochemist and medical researcher extraordinaire Maud Menten (1878-1960), coauthor of the Michalis-Menten equation, inventor of the azo-dye coupling which was the first example of enzyme histochemistry for imaging tissues and the first person to perform electrophoresis separating of blood hemoglobin, amongst her many accomplishments.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/593620336
#linocut #printmaking #histsci #womenInSTEM #biochemistry -
neural material for many species & regions of the brain& many discoveries in neuroanatomy.
In 1922 he founded the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Biológicas, which has since become Instituto Cajal, or the Cajal Institute, in his honour. He worked until his death at age 82, in Madrid. 🧵5/5
#sciart #linocut #printmaking #histsci -
Happy birthday to #neurologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 - 1934), here in front of Purkinje and granule cells from a pigeon, based on one of his own drawings! Cajal &Golgi won the Nobel in 1906, “in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system”. He was as much of an artist as he was a scientist & his 100s of drawings are still used for teaching purposes.
🧵https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/642707290
#sciart #linocut #printmaking #histsci #PurkinjeCell #neuroscience #MastoArt -
"Contrairement à une idée largement répandue, Lamarck ne fut ni un prophète isolé, ni un précurseur de Darwin auquel on aurait omis de rendre justice. Pas davantage un homme dépassé par son époque que les travaux novateurs des Lavoisier, Cuvier, Haüy puis Darwin auraient relégué au second plan.
Telle est la thèse soutenue par Pietro Corsi qui montre que le célèbre naturaliste participa pleinement aux grands débats de son temps sur l’extinction des espèces, sur la réforme de l’histoire naturelle, les limites épistémologiques des théories de la Terre ou la méthode naturelle en taxinomie... "
https://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/35613
#histsci #histbio #histnat #openedition -
Happy birthday to British #engineer, #mathematician, #physicist & #inventor Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923). I’ve shown her in my #linocut with a diagram of the dividers from her 1st of 26 (!) patents, one of her diagrams about the origin & growth of ripple marks & one of her diagrams of an electric arc lamp (a subject on which she literally wrote the textbook).
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was the 3rd 🧵https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/966154261
#printmaking #sciart #WomenInSTEM #histsci #suffragette #mastoArt
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Happy birthday to British #engineer, #mathematician, #physicist & #inventor Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923). I’ve shown her in my #linocut with a diagram of the dividers from her 1st of 26 (!) patents, one of her diagrams about the origin & growth of ripple marks & one of her diagrams of an electric arc lamp (a subject on which she literally wrote the textbook).
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was the 3rd 🧵https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/966154261
#printmaking #sciart #WomenInSTEM #histsci #suffragette #mastoArt
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Happy birthday to British #engineer, #mathematician, #physicist & #inventor Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923). I’ve shown her in my #linocut with a diagram of the dividers from her 1st of 26 (!) patents, one of her diagrams about the origin & growth of ripple marks & one of her diagrams of an electric arc lamp (a subject on which she literally wrote the textbook).
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was the 3rd 🧵https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/966154261
#printmaking #sciart #WomenInSTEM #histsci #suffragette #mastoArt
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Happy birthday to British #engineer, #mathematician, #physicist & #inventor Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923). I’ve shown her in my #linocut with a diagram of the dividers from her 1st of 26 (!) patents, one of her diagrams about the origin & growth of ripple marks & one of her diagrams of an electric arc lamp (a subject on which she literally wrote the textbook).
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was the 3rd 🧵https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/966154261
#printmaking #sciart #WomenInSTEM #histsci #suffragette #mastoArt
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Happy birthday to British #engineer, #mathematician, #physicist & #inventor Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923). I’ve shown her in my #linocut with a diagram of the dividers from her 1st of 26 (!) patents, one of her diagrams about the origin & growth of ripple marks & one of her diagrams of an electric arc lamp (a subject on which she literally wrote the textbook).
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was the 3rd 🧵https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/966154261
#printmaking #sciart #WomenInSTEM #histsci #suffragette #mastoArt
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A short #BookReview of ‘Form & Number: A History of Mathematical Beauty’ in ‘Mathematics Magazine’ has been pointed out to me: https://doi.org/10.1080/0025570X.2025.2587000 (not open-access)
I am quite pleased by the reviewer's evaluation :-) ‘a very careful and absolutely thorough survey of the “rich heritage of scholarship” about both beauty in mathematics and the study of that topic’.
There was a more detailed review by Viktor Blåsjö in ‘TUGboat’ last year: https://doi.org/10.47397/tb/46-2/tb143reviews-cain (open-access)
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I spoke with @[email protected] from GEO Magazin about HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY. Gesa’s interview essay is out in the print edition of the May issue! Online version to come but the print mag is GORGEOUS. 💙📚 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thCentury #politics #HAMH
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Happy birthday to #mathematician Felix Klein (1849-1925). This is a hand-carved and hand-printed image of the famous mathematical object, the Klein bottle, printed in a gradient of pale yellow-green to darker blue-green on paper 8” by 8” (20.3 cm by 20.3 cm). First described by mathematician Felix Klein in 1882, this object has a single surface, rather like a 3D version of a Möbius strip. It is what is called a 🧵
