Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/October 21

October 21:

 * 1505 – Death of Paul Scriptoris, German mathematician


 * 1520 - Ferdinand Magellan discovers a strait now known as Strait of Magellan


 * 1660 – Birth of Georg Ernst Stahl, German scientist (d. 1734)


 * 1687 – Birth of Nicolaus I Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician (d. 1759)


 * 1821 – Birth of Eduard Heine, German mathematician (d. 1881)


 * 1824 - Joseph Aspdin patents Portland cement


 * 1833 – Birth of Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and founder of the Nobel Prize (d. 1896)


 * 1872 – Death of Jacques Babinet, French physicist (b. 1794)


 * 1914 – Birth of Martin Gardner, American mathematician and writer


 * 1952 – Death of Hans Merensky, South African geologist and philanthropist (b. 1871)


 * 1957 – Birth of Wolfgang Ketterle, German physicist, Nobel laureate


 * 1965 - Comet Ikeya-Seki approaches perihelion, passing 450,000 kilometers from the sun


 * 1969 – Death of Waclaw Sierpinski, Polish mathematician (b. 1882)


 * 2003 - Images of the dwarf planet Eris are taken and subsequently used in its discovery by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz