In 1850, mathematician Sonya Kurtovsky Kovalevsky was born.
She faced much discrimination as a woman in the field of mathematics. Her greatest success in mathematics occurred in 1888 when she won the Prix Bordin of the French Academy of Sciences for her paper On the Problem of the Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed Point.
Read more about her at http://www.sonoma.edu/Math/faculty/falbo/Kovalev.html
In 1907, the 3-element vacuum tube, or audion, was patented by Dr. Lee De Forest.
The audion takes relatively weak electrical signals and amplifies them. De Forest is one of the fathers of the electronic age, as his Audion helped to usher in the widespread use of electronics.
Learn more at http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Basis/audion.html
