Magni Formica Laboris

An incident in Central California last week was so bizarre that the headlines it generated wouldn't be out of place in a supermarket tabloid next to tales of alien babies and Elvis sightings: "Man Killed by Rooster." More specifically, one of the feathered contestants in an illegal cockfight in Tulare County, armed with a blade attached to its leg, apparently stabbed 35-year-old Jose Luis Ochoa in the calf, and Ochoa was declared dead of "sharp force injury" two hours later. This isn't the first time someone has died in what is supposed to be blood sport for birds; last summer in Merced, two men got into an argument over a $10 bet, one pulled out a gun and killed the other, and the victim's brother and another man allegedly beat the shooter to death. But aside from the question of whether cockfights are humane for humans, they raise serious concerns about whether the state of California is doing enough to discourage them.

The doctoral dissertation (1799) of Gauss contained a proof of the ”fundamental theorem of algebra” which states that every complex non-constant polynomial in one variable has at least one complex root. In 1807 Gauss became a professor at Gottingen University. When planetoid Ceres was discovered on January 1st, 1801, Gauss was able to compute its orbit from only a few observations. On December 31st of the same year, Ceres showed up again, exactly where Gauss had predicted. Gauss had used ”least-squares” prediction which is based on the assumption that the observation errors were normally distributed. Gauss invented modular arithmetic in 1801, and in 1831 introduced the term ”complex number”. Together with Wilhelm Weber, Gauss constructed the electromagnetic telegraph in 1834.