Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/February 24

February 24:

 * 1304 - Birth of Ibn Battuta, Arabian explorer


 * 1463 - Birth of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Italian humanist (d. 1494)


 * 1582 - Pope Gregory XIII announces the Gregorian calendar


 * 1588 - Death of Johann Weyer, Dutch physician and occultist


 * 1709 - Birth of Jacques de Vaucanson, French inventor (d. 1782)


 * 1779 - Death of Paul Daniel Longolius, German encyclopedist (b. 1704)


 * 1799 - Death of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist (b. 1742)


 * 1810 - Death of Henry Cavendish, English scientist (b. 1756)


 * 1812 - Death of Étienne-Louis Malus, French physicist and mathematician (b. 1775)


 * 1839 - William Otis receives a patent for the steam shovel


 * 1856 - Death of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Russian mathematician (b. 1792)


 * 1866 - Birth of Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev, Russian physicist (d. 1912)


 * 1925 - A thermite (magnesium) bomb is used for the first time to break up a 250,000-ton ice jam clogging the St. Lawrence River near [[Waddington (town), New York|Waddington, New York]


 * 1946 - Birth of Grigory Margulis, Russian mathematician