17 november

Six weeks as the guest of the publisher Kaizō-sha, lecturing from Tokyo to Fukuoka. Crowds met him at stations, and the diary he kept is full of delight in Japan and of prejudices about the other peoples he met on the voyage.

After Chaim Weizmann died, Ben-Gurion’s government asked through its ambassador, Abba Eban, whether he would take the largely ceremonial post. He said he was “deeply moved”, but lacked “both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people”, and declined the next day.

Taniyama took his own life in Tokyo at 31, while engaged to be married. Shimura carried on the work, and the conjecture came to bear both their names.

A two-week booking ran for months. Leonard Bernstein called him a genius, other musicians walked out, and the jazz world split over him as it had over bebop.

A coalition set out to desegregate all of Albany, Georgia, at once. Police Chief Laurie Pritchett jailed marchers by the hundred without public brutality and spread them among county jails so that his own never filled. King was arrested twice and left with little won; the lesson, pick one target,…

A month after his Olympic 800 and 1500 metres double in Tokyo, Snell took three tenths off his own record at home.

The first rover on another world, driven from the Crimea by a crew watching a slow television feed. It covered about 10.5 km over eleven lunar days. Its laser reflector was found again in 2010 and still bounces back pulses fired from Earth.

An eight-wheeled rover driven from a control room in Crimea, with a delay of several seconds on every command. It covered 10.5 km in ten months.

Six weeks from a beaten student march to a dissident in Prague Castle. Timothy Garton Ash, who watched it, put it to Havel that “in Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!”

A sanctioned march for the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi closure of Czech universities turned toward Wenceslas Square. Riot police boxed it in on Národní třída and beat hundreds. A false rumour that a student had been killed spread the anger across the country.