Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/May 16

May 16
 * 1718 - Birth of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Italian mathematician (d. 1799)
 * 1763 - Birth of Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, French pharmacist and chemist (d. 1829)
 * 1782 - Death of Daniel Solander, Swedish botanist (b. 1736)
 * 1821 - Birth of Pafnuty Chebyshev, Russian mathematician (d. 1894)
 * 1830 - Death of Joseph Fourier, French mathematician and physicist (b. 1768)
 * 1831 - Birth of David E. Hughes, American inventor (d. 1900])
 * 1845 - Birth of Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, Russian microbiologist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1916)
 * 1947 - Death of Frederick Hopkins, English biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1861)
 * 1950 - Birth of J. Georg Bednorz, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
 * 1960 - Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
 * 1969 - Venera 5, a spaceprobe from the Soviet Venera program, lands on Venus.