From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
May 12
- 1684 - Death of Edme Mariotte, French physicist and priest
- 1748 - Death of Thomas Lowndes, English astronomer (b. 1692)
- 1784 - Death of Abraham Trembley, Swiss naturalist (b. 1710)
- 1803 - Birth of Justus von Liebig, German chemist (d. 1873)
- 1805 - Birth of William Rowan Hamilton, Irish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer (d. 1865)
- 1871 - Death of Anselme Payen, French physicist (b. 1795)
- 1880 - Birth of Lincoln Ellsworth, American scientist and polar explorer (d. 1951)
- 1895 - Birth of William Giauque, Canadian chemist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1982)
- 1910 - Birth of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, British chemist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1994)
- 1941 - Konrad Zuse presents the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer in Berlin.
- 1965 - The Soviet spacecraft Luna 5 crashes on the Moon.
- 1994 - Death of Erik Erikson, German psychoanalyst (b. 1902)
