Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/April 26

April 26:

• 1774 - Birth of Christian Leopold von Buch, German geologist (d. 1853)

• 1785 - Birth of John James Audubon, French-American naturalist and illustrator (d. 1851)

• 1879 - Birth of Owen Willans Richardson, British physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1959)

• 1900 - Birth of Charles Richter, American geophysicist (d. 1985)

• 1920 - Death of Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician (b. 1887)

• 1932 - Birth of Michael Smith, English-born chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 2000)

• 1933 - Birth of Arno Allan Penzias, German-born physicist, Nobel laureate

• 1940 - Death of Carl Bosch, German chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1874)

• 1951 - Death of Arnold Sommerfeld, German physicist (b. 1868)

• 1986 - In Ukraine, a nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, creating the world's worst nuclear disaster

• 1994 - Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle