1832 in science

The year 1832 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• Dr. Thomas Bell begins publication of A Monograph of the Testudinata, the first comprehensive study of the world's turtles.
• Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire begins publication of Histoire générale et particulière des anomalies de l’organisation chez l’homme et les animaux, a key text on teratology.^[1]

Chemistry

• Friedrich Wöhler and Justus von Liebig discover and explain functional groups and radicals in relation to organic chemistry.^[2]

Exploration

• April 21 – Cyrille Pierre Théodore Laplace completes a four-year global circumnavigation.

Mathematics

• Évariste Galois presents a general condition for the solvability of algebraic equations, thereby essentially founding group theory and Galois theory.^[3]
• Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet proves Fermat's last theorem for n = 14.
• János Bolyai's system of non-Euclidean geometry is first published.^[4]

Medicine

• February 12 – In England, a second cholera pandemic begins to spread, starting from the East End of London. It is declared officially over in early May but deaths continue. It will claim at least 3000 victims. In Liverpool, Kitty Wilkinson becomes the "Saint of the Slums"^[5] by promoting hygiene.^[6]
• July 19 – Anatomy Act in the United Kingdom provides for licencing and inspection of anatomists, and for unclaimed bodies from public institutions to be available for their dissection.
• Dr James Kay publishes The moral and physical condition of the working-class employed in the cotton manufacture in Manchester.
• Thomas Hodgkin first describes abnormalities in the lymph system later known as Hodgkin's lymphoma.^[7][8]

Oceanography

• James Rennell's An Investigation of the Currents of the Atlantic Ocean, and of those which prevail between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic is published posthumously by his daughter. It will not be significantly superseded for more than a century.^[9]

Physics

• Michael Faraday states his laws of electrolysis.

Psychology

• Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker first publishes the optical illusion which becomes known as the Necker Cube.^[10]

Awards

• Copley Medal: Michael Faraday; Siméon Poisson

Births

• June 17 – William Crookes (died 1919), chemist and physicist.
• August 16 – Wilhelm Wundt (died 1920), physiologist and psychologist.
• December 12 – Ludwig Sylow (died 1918), mathematician.
• December 15 – Gustave Eiffel (died 1923), structural engineer.

Deaths

• May 13 – Georges Cuvier (born 1769), zoologist.
• May 31 – Évariste Galois (born 1811), mathematician.
• August 24 – Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (born 1796), mathematician
• September 2 – Franz Xaver, Baron Von Zach (born 1754), astronomer.
• October 31 – Antonio Scarpa (born 1752), anatomist.
• Marie-Jeanne de Lalande, French astronomer, (born 1760).

References