12. Mai

Twenty years old, Bassi had defended 49 theses in public in April; the city crowned her with laurel in the Palazzo Pubblico and the university gave her a paid lectureship, which made her the first woman to be salaried to teach at a university. In 1776 she became professor of experimental physics,…

After a six-week siege General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered the city and more than 5,000 men, the largest American surrender of the war.

Shut out of the École polytechnique as a woman, Germain taught herself and wrote to Gauss from 1804 as “Monsieur Le Blanc”. In this letter she laid out a plan to prove the whole theorem, not just one exponent. The plan fell short, but a piece of it survives as Germain’s theorem: for many primes p,…

For nearly twenty-four hours in rain, men fought hand to hand across the log walls of a salient in Lee’s line. Musket fire cut through an oak tree 22 inches thick.

The last battle of the war, near the mouth of the Rio Grande, a month after Appomattox, and a Confederate victory. Union losses were 118 (NPS). Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana is held to be the last man killed in combat.

The Count quizzes Harker on English law: may a man have two solicitors, and could one see to his banking and another to his shipping? Harker is made to write that he will stay a month, and glimpses the Count’s outgoing letters: one to Billington at Whitby and one to Leutner at Varna, besides two…

Looking out of his window by moonlight, Harker sees the Count come out of a window below and crawl down the castle wall face down, “just as a lizard moves along a wall”, his cloak spread out like wings. He had not believed his eyes until he saw the fingers and toes grip stones worn clear of their…

After the Western powers brought a new currency into their zones, the Soviets cut every road, rail and canal link to West Berlin. The Americans and British flew the city’s food and coal in instead: more than 2.3 million tons in some 278,000 flights. Stalin lifted the blockade after eleven months;…

By 1973 writers such as Phase 2 and Super Kool 223 had turned tags into “pieces” that ran the height of a subway car; by the late 1970s whole trains moved through the city covered end to end. The Transit Authority spent the 1980s buffing cars and fencing yards, and on 12 May 1989 it declared the…

In 1,763 couples in nine countries, from Botswana to Brazil and Thailand, starting treatment early cut transmission to the HIV-negative partner by 96 per cent. Science named it the breakthrough of the year.