German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann died #OTD in 1939.
In 1882, Lindemann published the result for which he is best known, the transcendence of π. His methods were similar to those used nine years earlier by Charles Hermite to show that e, the base of natural logarithms, is transcendental. Before the publication of Lindemann's proof, it was known that π was irrational, as Johann Heinrich Lambert proved π was irrational in the 1760s. via @wikipedia
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