1933 in science

The year 1933 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky invent the concept of the neutron star, a new type of celestial object, suggesting that supernovae might be created by the collapse of a normal star to form a neutron star.

Earth sciences

• March 10 - Long Beach earthquake in Southern California: First recording of earthquake strong ground motions by an accelerograph network, installed in 1932 by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

Mathematics

• Andrey Kolmogorov publishes Foundations of the Theory of Probability, laying the modern axiomatic foundations of probability theory.^[1]
• David Champernowne, while still a Cambridge undergraduate, publishes his work on the Champernowne constant in real numbers.^[2][3]
• Stanley Skewes discovers Skewes' number.^[4]

Events

• Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago) first opens to the public, as part of the Century of Progress Exposition.
• The Institute for Advanced Study opens at Princeton, New Jersey, attracting Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel.

Births

• January 6 - Oleg Makarov (d. 2003), cosmonaut.
• March 23 - Philip Zimbardo, social psychologist.
• August 15 - Stanley Milgram (d. 1984), social psychologist.
• September 10 - Yevgeny Khrunov (d. 2000), cosmonaut.

Deaths

• September 25 - Paul Ehrenfest (b. 1880), Austrian physicist and mathematician.
• December 8 - John Joly (b. 1857), physicist.

References