A very interesting field within science and history is archeoastronomy,
the study of how people and cultures in the past viewed the sky.
One wonderful example of archaeoastronomy is the astronomical ceiling in the Tomb of Senemut,
from Egypt around 1473 B.C.
Scientific history is interesting in general. For example, the mentor of the famous Johannes Kepler
was Michael Maestlin.
According to this paper from 1878, he created
the first catalog of the Pleiades star cluster in 1579.
Have you ever heard of the Mason-Dixon Line?
It is the line creating the borders between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.
It turns out that Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason traveled together to
Cape Town, South Africa, to observe the transit of Venus in front of the Sun in 1761,
as detailed here.
Observing the transit of Venus was important because they could use measurements
from the transit to estimate the solar parallax,
and thus estimate the distance from Earth to the Sun. Mason and Dixon apparently
worked so well together that just two years later in 1763 they were sent to
the American colonies to settle a border dispute and create their famous line.
Math
If you have a set of data and you want to test if it is from a certain distribution,
you can use the Anderson-Darling test.
Here is the original paper from 1952.
