Wikipedia:Main Page history/2024 October 15
From today's featured article
Did you know ...
- ... that as the 1979 computer chess game Chesmac (pictured) could not display a chessboard on screen, players had to replicate the game on a physical chessboard?
- ... that Samuel Barber said that he could not adequately play his own Piano Sonata?
- ... that geographer Michael Chisholm and contemporaries became known as "Caesar's Praetorian Guard", in reference to their teacher Gus Caesar?
- ... that Anne Morrow Lindbergh tried to warn her husband Charles Lindbergh of the backlash that his antisemitic Des Moines speech would receive?
- ... that Rose Betts wrote the song "Driving Myself Home" as a joke after a blind date, only for it to go viral on TikTok?
- ... that an art critic felt that Rooms by the Sea was one of Edward Hopper's "strangest" works?
- ... that when Swedish soccer player Beata Olsson transferred from Florida to Florida State, she said that she did not really know about the schools' rivalry?
- ... that John Passmore Edwards erected a library in memory of his mother?
- ... that researchers want Hymenophyllum axsmithii rhizomes so that they can tell whether the filmy fern was up a tree?
In the news
- The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson for their studies of global inequality.
- The comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) (pictured) is visible in the western sky after sunset.
- The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang.
On this day
- 1529 – Ottoman–Habsburg wars: The siege of Vienna ended with Austrian forces repelling the invading Turks, turning the tide against almost a century of conquest in Europe by the Ottoman Empire.
- 1888 – The "From Hell" letter, allegedly from Jack the Ripper, was sent to George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in London.
- 1965 – Vietnam War protests: At an anti-war rally in New York City, David J. Miller burned his draft card (example pictured), the first such act to result in arrest under a new amendment to the Selective Service Act.
- 1979 – President Carlos Humberto Romero of El Salvador was overthrown and exiled in a military coup d'état.
- Razia Sultana (d. 1240)
- Marie-Marguerite d'Youville (b. 1701)
- Franklin Peale (b. 1795)
- Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (d. 1988)
Today's featured picture
Wheat Fields is a series of dozens of paintings by the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, borne out of his religious studies and sermons, connection to nature, appreciation of manual laborers and desire to provide a means of offering comfort to others. The series includes this 1890 oil-on-canvas landscape, painted at Auvers-sur-Oise and titled Wheatfield with Cornflowers, now in the collection of the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, Switzerland. Painting credit: Vincent van Gogh
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