Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/March 5

March 5:

 * 1512 - Birth of Gerardus Mercator, Flemish cartographer (d. 1594)
 * 1575 - Birth of William Oughtred, English mathematician (d. 1660)
 * 1739 - Birth of Benjamin Ruggles Woodbridge, American physician and statesman (d. 1819)
 * 1748 - Birth of Jonas C. Dryander, Swedish botanist (d. 1810)
 * 1794 - Birth of Jacques Babinet, French physicist (d. 1872)
 * 1827 - Death of Pierre-Simon Laplace, French mathematician (b. 1749)
 * 1827  - Death of Alessandro Volta, Italian physicist (b. 1745)
 * 1904 - Nikola Tesla, in Electrical World and Engineer, describes the process of the ball lightning formation
 * 1915 - Birth of Laurent Schwartz, French mathematician (d. 2002)
 * 1925 - Death of Johan Jensen, Danish mathematician (b. 1859)
 * 1927 - Death of Franz Mertens, German mathematician (b. 1840)
 * 1960 - The Aquatic ape hypothesis originates when Alister Hardy publicly announces his idea that ape-human divergence may have been due to a coastal phase
 * 1979 - Detection equipment picks up a gamma-ray burst originating from the Large Magellanic Cloud, leading to the discovery of soft gamma repeaters