Also on This Day in History December 22
Discover what happened on December 22 with HISTORY's summaries of major events, anniversaries,
famous births and notable deaths.
Births on This Day, December 22
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1911
Grote Reber
U.S. amateur astronomer and radio engineer who self-financed and built the first radio telescope.
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1887
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who did notable work on hypergeometric series and continued fractions.
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1876
Gustav Waldemar Elmen
Swedish-American electrical engineer and metallurgist who created Permalloy (1916) and related alloys with high magnetic permeability used in communications equipment.
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1765
Johann Friedrich Pfaff
German mathematician who proposed the first general method of integrating partial differential equations of the first order.
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1903
Haldan Keffer Hartline
American physiologist who shared (with George Wald and Ragnar Granit) the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his analysis of how the sensory cells of the retina of the eye evaluate the light stimulus.
Deaths on This Day, December 22
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1828
William Hyde Wollaston
English chemist and physicist who discovered palladium (1803) and rhodium (1804), during his investigation of platinum ore.
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1867
Jean-Victor Poncelet
French mathematician and engineer whose study of the pole and polar lines associated with conic led to the principle of duality.
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1902
Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing
German neurologist and neuropsychiatrist (baron) who opened the field of sexual psychopathology.
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2003
John Holter
American inventor of a pioneering valve used in the treatment of hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”). Shortly after birth (1955), his son suffered from hydrocephalus.
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1921
James Mooney
Early American ethnographer of American Indians, especially those of the southeastern United States.