5 stories from this place.
Alan Turing was found dead at his Wilmslow home on 8 June 1954, aged 41. The coroner ruled suicide by cyanide poisoning; a half-eaten apple lay beside the bed. The Crown Prosecution Service had convicted him of gross indecency two years earlier and ordered chemical castration as an alternative to prison. The pardon arrived in 2013.
Read the story →Charles Babbage received approximately £17,500 of British government funding between 1823 and 1842 to build the Difference Engine, a brass mechanical calculator for producing accurate mathematical tables. He never finished it. His subsequent Analytical Engine (1837) was a general-purpose programmable computer that he also never built. A complete Difference Engine No. 2 to his original 1849 specifications was built by the Science Museum London in 1991 and works.
Read the story →Rosalind Franklin produced X-ray diffraction Photo 51 of DNA in May 1952. Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson in January 1953 without her knowledge. The Watson-Crick double-helix paper appeared in *Nature* on 25 April 1953. Franklin died of ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, aged 37. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.
Read the story →Annie Scott Dill Russell Maunder was a Cambridge-trained mathematician who spent thirty years at the Royal Greenwich Observatory photographing the Sun. She discovered the substantive equator-ward drift of sunspots through the solar cycle and co-authored the historical work that gave her husband Edward Maunder credit for what should have been a joint discovery.
Read the story →Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed the differential and integral calculus in the 1670s and 1680s. Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism in 1699. The subsequent thirty-year priority war split the European mathematical community along Newtonian-British and Leibnizian-Continental lines and substantially retarded British mathematics for the next century.
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