Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/March 31

March 31:

 * 1596 - Birth of René Descartes, French mathematician (d. 1650)


 * 1727 - Death of Sir Isaac Newton, English mathematician and physicist (b. 1643)


 * 1730 - Birth of Étienne Bézout, French mathematician (d. 1783)


 * 1777 - Birth of Charles Cagniard de la Tour, French physicist (d. 1859)


 * 1778 - Birth of Coenraad Jacob Temminck, Dutch zoologist (d. 1858)


 * 1811 - Birth of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, German chemist and inventor (d. 1899)


 * 1847 - Birth of Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev, Russian mathematician (d. 1878)


 * 1877 - Death of Antoine Augustin Cournot, French mathematician (b. 1801)


 * 1884 - Birth of Adriaan van Maanen, Dutch-American astronomer (d. 1946)


 * 1890 - Birth of Lawrence Bragg, English physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1971)


 * 1903 - Richard Pearse allegedly makes a powered flight in an early aircraft


 * 1906 - Birth of Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, Japanese physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1979)


 * 1918 - Daylight saving time goes into effect in the United States for the first time


 * 1934 - Birth of Carlo Rubbia, Italian physicist, Nobel laureate


 * 1945 - Death of Hans Fischer, German chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1881)


 * 1951 - The first commercial United States made computer, the UNIVAC I, is delivered to the United States Census Bureau


 * 1978 - Death of Charles Best, Canadian medical scientist (b. 1899)


 * 1994 - Human evolution: The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull


 * 2001 - Death of Clifford Shull, American physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1915)