| Wang Qilong
looks at the future from the past through "Today in History", and can also change the future from the present.
Today is December 21, 2022. On this day 55 years ago, the world's first heart transplant patient passed away; the world's first heart transplant patient, Louis Washkanski, lived for 18 days with the heart of a 25-year-old woman who died in a car accident and died in Cape Town, South Africa. Washkanski recovered well after the operation, but his life was taken away only because of lung problems. Looking back at December 21st in the history of technology, what other impressive key events happened on this day?
December 21, 1849: George Grant, pioneer of mechanical calculator, was born
George Barnard Grant (George Barnard Grant) was born on December 21, 1849. He was an American mechanical engineer, inventor, entrepreneur and botanist. He is known as the "Father of the American Gear Cutting Industry" for his important contributions to 19th-century mechanical calculators, pioneering new techniques for gear manufacturing, and founding several successful companies.
Source: Wikipedia
Grant was born into a farming family in Gardner, Maine. His parents were descendants of families that originally came to New England in the 1630s. He prepared for college at Bridgeton College, and then began preparatory studies at Chandler College of Science at Dartmouth College for three semesters; in 1869, Grant transferred to Lawrence College of Science at Harvard University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1873.
While studying at Harvard , Grant worked on solving the problem of inventing a mechanical calculator. Encouraged by his professors, he set about improving the work left by Babbage, the "father of computers"; he published his work in the American Journal of Science and Arts and received two patents as a student.
Shortly after graduating from college, Grant designed and built two computers, exhibiting one at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. One of them, known as the Difference Engine, was 8 feet long, 5 feet high, and weighed 2,000 pounds, making it probably the largest calculator ever built. The machine Grant invented won many awards: the Centennial Medal, the Scott Medal of the Franklin Institute, and the Gold Medal of the Massachusetts Mechanics Society.
As a product of his work with computers, Grant gradually became interested in the construction of gears. The field of gear manufacturing went through considerable growth and change in the late 19th century, and Grant played a leading role in this development: for example, debates over the optimal design of gears raged for many years; in Grant's time, the most common were cycloidal gears, while Grant believed that involute gears were actually superior for most applications.
Grant was instrumental in changing industry practices, and since his time most of the gear produced in the world has been converted to involute . Grant, who never married, died on August 16, 1917, at the age of 68; several of the businesses he founded continue to operate many years after his death.
Source: Wikipedia
December 21, 1918: Klaus Samelson, pioneer in the field of programming language translation, was born
December 21, 1918, Klaus Samelson Samelson was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine. His elder brother is the mathematician Hans Samelson; Samelson is a German mathematician, physicist and computer pioneer. He is mainly engaged in programming language translation and research on push-pop stack algorithms for sequential formula translation on computers.
Source: Wikipedia
Klaus Sammelson lived in Breslau, a city in southwestern Poland during his childhood; due to the impact of World War II, he did not start college until 1946, studying mathematics and physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. After graduation, he worked briefly as a high school teacher.In 1951 he completed his PhD in Physics under the supervision of Friedrich Popper, with a thesis on quantum mechanical problems related to unipolar induction proposed by Arnold Sommerfeld.
While in school, Samelson became interested in numerical analysis . When electrical engineer Hans Piloty and mathematics professor Robert Sauer began a collaborative project, he joined the project and participated in the research of early computers as an assistant researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Munich. This experience changed his scientific career, and his first published article stemmed from Robert Sauer's interest in dealing with the numerical accuracy of supersonic flows and eigenvalue numerical calculations.
Soon after, Samelson's influence began to promote the development of computer science and informatics as a new scientific discipline. Together with Friedrich Bauer, he studied the structure of programming languages and developed efficient algorithms for their translation and implementation; this research led to the birth of the bracket structure of programming languages, which Sammelson clearly recognized would be a fundamental breakthrough in the way computer systems were built and designed.
Samelson was also involved in the international standard for programming and informatics, and played a key role in the design of ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60. In 1958, he was hired as a professor of mathematics at the University of Mainz; from 1963, he served as a professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he once again collaborated with Friedrich Bauer to develop university courses in informatics and computer science. When the Journal of Informatics was founded in 1971, he became its editor.
Source: Wikipedia
December 21, 1929: Douglas Ross, the father of automatic programming tools, was born
Douglas Taylor Ross (Douglas Taylor Ross) was born on December 21, 1929. He is a pioneering computer scientist in the United States and the chairman of SofTech, a software company and the founder of Pascal Early supplier of compilers; Douglas Ross is credited with coining the term CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and is considered the father of APT (Automated Programming Tool), a language that drove CNC manufacturing. In addition, Douglas is the inventor of SADT, Structured Analysis and Design Technique, and an early developer of structured analysis methods.
Source: Wikipedia
In 1951, Ross received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oberlin College (Oberlin College) with honors, and a master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT (MIT) in 1954. Later, he started working on a PhD at MIT but did not complete it because of the pressure of his job as head of the Computer Applications Group at MIT at the time.
In the 1950s, he participated in MIT's Tornado computer project. In 1969, Ross founded SofTech as an early supplier of custom compilers for the U.S. Department of Defense's Ada and Pascal languages. Ross has lectured and served as chair emeritus in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He served as president of SofTech Corporation from 1969 to 1975, ultimately retiring as chairman of the board of directors.
Ross made significant contributions to MIT's Whirlwind Computer Project, the world's first program to study computer real-time text and graphics. Douglas Ross is considered by many to be the father of automatic programming and tools, and he also invented the term computer-aided design, CAD.
Around 1954, Ross wrote the first hand-drawn graphics input program for a computer, which he said was "one of the few programs I've ever written that worked successfully the first time"; in the early 1960s, the first commercial computer-aided design (CAD) systems appeared on the market. The first of these were used by large aerospace, engineering and information technology companies such as Lockheed, General Motors and IBM.
In the 1990s, the concept of solid modeling began to become popular, and 3D CAD came into being; 3D modeling is a completely different way of thinking and working, so everyone needs to spend a longer time to adapt to it; with the significant growth of the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) market, the CAD software industry has also entered a brand new field, containing an unlimited future.
Source: Wikipedia
December 21, 1995: Yukihiro Matsumoto released Ruby 0.95
Ruby is an object-oriented, imperative, functional, dynamic general-purpose programming language designed and developed by Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) in the mid-1990s. It draws on and absorbs the features of languages such as Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada and Lisp; Yukihiro Matsumoto designed Ruby based on the principles of simplicity, scalability and stability. He hopes that programmers who use Ruby will feel happy and efficient from the bottom of their hearts.
Yukihiro Matsumoto started writing Ruby on February 24, 1993, and it was not officially released to the newsgroup until December 21, 1995. The name Ruby was inspired by Perl because the pronunciation of Perl is the same as Pearl, the birthstone of June. Ruby was named after Ruby, the birthstone of July.
Source: Wikipedia
Ruby is relatively younger than other similar programming languages (such as Perl or Python), and because Ruby was invented by the Japanese, early non-Japanese materials and programs are relatively poor. Today, you can still find criticisms about Ruby's early lack of information on the Internet. Around 2000, Ruby began to make its way to the United States, and English-language material began to develop.
In 2004, the Rails framework was born, making Ruby more widely known. Later, Ruby became TIOBE in 2006 and was selected as the Programming Language of the Year. Interestingly, Ruby is actually widely known in China's early game maker community, because the well-known game production software RPG Maker is based on Ruby for game programming .
Programming languages are developed through a process of trial and error. Many programming languages have died, leaving only their names in history, but the ideas contained in them have been absorbed and borrowed in different forms by subsequent languages.
- Yukihiro Matsumoto
Ruby's design concept is to reduce unnecessary trivial time during programming. Making programmers happy is a primary consideration for Yukihiro Matsumoto who designed the Ruby language; the second is a good interface design .
He emphasized that system design must emphasize humanization instead of blindly imagining it from the perspective of the machine; following the principle of least surprise, the Ruby language is usually very intuitive and runs the way the programmer thinks it should. Yukihiro Matsumoto also believes that Ruby (Smalltalk + Perl) / 2, indicating that Ruby is a programming language with a syntax that is completely object-oriented and script-executable like Smalltalk, and has the powerful word processing capabilities of Perl.
The discussion between Ruby and Perl never stops. Tang Feng (Autrijus/Audrey), who ranks first on
CPAN and is also the developer of Perl 6, once said: "Ruby is 'Perl 6 without advertising everywhere'."
When Matsumoto Yukihiro was interviewed, he mentioned that "Ruby borrows a lot of things from Perl..., Python is far less than Perl...", "I think the name Ruby is as good as Perl The name of a subsequent language couldn't be more appropriate. "
Even Larry Wall, the father of Perl, said: "In many ways, I still like Ruby, because those parts are borrowed from Perl:-)", "I also like Ruby. C* unary asterisk operator, so I added it to Perl 6. ”
With the development of the Ruby language, the Ruby language itself has also developed Ruby language alternatives for other platforms such as JRuby (Java platform), IronRuby (.NET platform) and other platforms. What do you think of the Ruby language? Feel free to share your insights in the comment area.
Source: Wikipedia
December 21, 2012: Mayan Calendar Predicts 'End of the World'
The 2012 phenomenon refers to a set of eschatological views that believe a catastrophic or transformative event will occur in the world around December 21, 2012. This day is considered the last day of the 5126 annual cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Calendar. Countries affected by the Mayan civilization (Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador) hold activities on this day. The Mayan civilization itself belongs to the ancient Indian civilization in South America, an outstanding representative of the ancient Indian civilization in the Americas, and is named after the Indian Maya; the Mayan civilization was formed around 2500 BC, and an early slave state was established around 400 BC. It flourished from the 3rd to the 9th century AD, declined in the 15th century, and was finally destroyed by Spanish colonists. Since then, it has been lost in the tropical jungle for a long time.
The popular doomsday theory believes that on December 21, 2012, the sun will reach the so-called "Galactic equator" of the Milky Way . This special event is said to occur only once every 25,800 years. However, the reality is that the Milky Way does not have an exact Milky Way, it is not a line, and the Sun has been on the Milky Way on the winter solstice in the past few years and will continue to be so in the next few years.
Image source: Wikipedia
2012 The phenomenon has been discussed or mentioned by many media. Several TV documentaries and popular fictional works mentioning 2012 all believe that December 21 is the day when the catastrophic event occurred; the 2009 disaster film "2012" inspired by the 2012 end of the world used a secret marketing strategy in the pre-heating publicity campaign, with the help of the fictional organization "Institue for Human Sustainability" Continuity's television stations and websites urge everyone to prepare for the end of the world. The promotional content associated with
did not mention the movie, leading many viewers to believe it and panicked to contact astronomers; even though the campaign was heavily criticized, the film remained the most successful film of the year, grossing nearly $770 million at the global box office.
passed in 2012, but many writers continued to explore related themes, including Graham Hancock in 2015 The 2010 book "Gods and Magicians" wrote: "It seems that the Mayans never said the end of the world, but said that this was an era - the end of the era of great reforms and world rebirth, and then a new cycle or era would begin." Founder Elon Musk has responded to these concerns, Hawking has pushed this artificial intelligence rebellion theory into reality, believing that it may "herald the demise of the human race."
Of course, I believe that in most cases, no matter how human civilization ends, it will not have much impact on the earth that has existed for hundreds of millions of years; Cambridge University 's "Cambridge Project" once pointed out that the "biggest threats" to mankind are man-made: they are artificial intelligence , global warming, nuclear war and harmful biotechnology. If the end of the world were to come so soon, what would you do on that day? Welcome to participate in this poll and share your insights in the comment area.
[Contributions welcome] Using history as a mirror, we can know the ups and downs. Since the development of computer science, there have been many crucial events and figures. All friends are welcome to join in building "Today in History". Submission email: [email protected].
