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Important events from the history of math that happened on this day:

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January 19th

1581 Andreas Dudith (1533-1589), mathematician and opponent of astrology, argued in a letter that observations of the comet of 1577 proved the Aristotelian explanation fallacious (for Aristotle, comets were accidental exhalations of hot air from the earth that rise in the sublunar sphere). Dudith's use of mathematically precise observations to criticize a general physical theory of Aristotle foreshadowed Galileo's work fifty years later.

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Andreas Dudith
Aristotle
Galileo Galilei
1833 Alfred Clebsch, who worked on invariant theory, born in Konigsberg, Russia.

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Alfred Clebsch
Invariant Theory
1879 Guido Fubini born in Venice, Italy. The prolific geometer and analyst may be best known for his namesake Fubini's Theorem.

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Guido Fubini
1911 Garrett Birkhoff born in Princeton, New Jersey. He wrote Survey of Modern Algebra with Saunders MacLane.

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Garrett Birkhoff

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