Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/April 24

April 24:

 * 1620 - Birth of John Graunt, English statistician and founder of the science of demography (d. 1674)


 * 1656 - Death of Thomas Fincke, Danish mathematician and physicist (b. 1561)


 * 1899 - Birth of Oscar Zariski, Russian-born mathematician (d. 1986)


 * 1916 - Ernest Shackleton and five men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition launch a lifeboat from uninhabited Elephant Island in the Southern Ocean to organise a rescue for ice-trapped ship Endurance


 * 1947 - Birth of Roger D. Kornberg, American chemist, Nobel-prized


 * 1960 - Death of Max von Laue, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1879)


 * 1964 - Death of Gerhard Domagk, German bacteriologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (declined) (b. 1895)


 * 1990 - STS-31: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery