Geophysicist and seismologist Inge Lehmann was born #OTD in 1888.
In 1936 she discovered the existence of a solid core at the center of the Earth, based on a careful analysis of global seismic records from a 1929 earthquake near New Zealand.
Image: Royal Danish Library
Lehman was one of the first women to work as a geophysicist.
(The Society of Exploration Geophysicists describes another woman, Elizabeth Stiles, as beginning her career in geophysics a few years prior. I haven’t found too many records of her work.)
Lehmann’s best known work — the one in which she proposed the existence of Earth’s solid core — has the shortest title I know of for a scientific paper. It is simply titled “ P’ “.
https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Inner-Core/Lehman-Inge-1936.pdf
Lehmann’s discovery was accepted pretty quickly by the scientific community, though a direct confirmation via more sensitive measurements wouldn’t take place until the early 1970s.
Still, according to this Smithsonian Magazine profile, her nephew quoted her as saying “You should know how many incompetent men I had to compete with—in vain.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/happy-birthday-inge-lehmann-180955246/
In 2015, Google honored Lehmann’s 127th birthday with this great doodle by illustrator Kevin Laughlin.
Ah wait, when I said “ P’ “ had the shortest title, I forgot this paper that Steinn Sigurðsson showed me. It’s titled “0”.
What is the funniest number in cryptography? 0. The reason is that for all x, x*0 = 0, i.e., the equation is always satisfied no matter what x is. This article discusses crypto bugs in four BLS signatures' libraries (ethereum/py ecc, supranational/blst, herumi/bls, sigp/milagro bls) that revolve around 0. Furthermore, we develop "splitting zero" attacks to show a weakness in the proof-of-possession aggregate signature scheme standardized in BLS RFC draft v4. Eth2 bug bounties program generously awarded $35,000 in total for the reported bugs.
Robert McNees