Robert Hooke was born exactly 391 years ago today! Hooke published his law of elasticity in 1676 as an anagram: "ceiiinosssttuv." He unscrambled it 2 years later: Ut tensio, sic vis - as the extension, so the force. This allowed him to later assert that he had knowledge of it as early as 1660.Interestingly, this can be viewed as one of the earliest examples of cryptographic hashing.

Ernst Chladni was a German physicist and musician, often called "the father of acoustics." In the late 18th century, he developed a technique that made sound visible: he sprinkled sand on metal plates and bowed them with a violin bow. The sand migrated to the nodal lines revealing geometric patterns now known as Chladni figures. In 1808 when Napoleon saw the demonstration and was so impressed he offered a prize for the best mathematical explanation. Sophie Germain, a self-taught French mathematician was the only entrant who got the approach right - though her solution had some flaws. She became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity theory. The math describing Chladni figures later showed up in quantum mechanics when Schrödinger used similar mathematics to describe electron orbitals.

"I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article and now I would like you to learn from them, too." The opening line of Sir Tony Hoare's 1980 Turing Award lecture. He passed away last week at 92 This week we feature the annotated version of the full lecture: "The Emperor's Old Clothes"