October 19

Birthdays

Thomas Love Peacock (18 October 1785 – 23 January 1866) was an English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they influenced each other's work. Peacock wrote satirical novels, each with the same basic setting — characters at a table discussing and criticizing the philosophical opinions of the day.

Peacock's own place in literature is pre-eminently that of a satirist. That he has nevertheless been the favourite only of the few is owing partly to the highly intellectual quality of his work, but mainly to his lack of ordinary qualifications of the novelist, all pretension to which he entirely disclaims. He has no plot, little human interest, and no consistent delineation of character. His personages are mere puppets, or, at best, incarnations of abstract qualities such as grace or beauty, but beautifully depicted.

His comedy combines the mock-Gothic with the Aristophanic. He suffers from that dramatist's faults and, though not as daring in invention or as free in the use of sexual humour, shares many of his strengths. His greatest intellectual love is for Ancient Greece, including late and minor works such as the Dionysiaca of Nonnus; many of his characters are given punning names taken from Greek to indicate their personality or philosophy

Pascual Jordan (18 October 1902 – 31 July 1980) was a theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions toquantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix mechanics, and developed canonical anticommutation relations for fermions. While the Jordan algebra he invented is no longer employed in quantum mechanics, it has found other mathematical applications.

Together with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg Jordan was co-author of an important series of papers on quantum mechanics. He went on to pioneer early quantum field theory before largely switching his focus to cosmology before World War II.

Jordan devised a type of non-associative algebras, now named Jordan algebras in his honor, in an attempt to create an algebra of observables for quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Today, von Neumann algebras are employed for this purpose. Jordan algebras have since been applied in projective geometry and number theory

Shaffer Chimere Smith (born October 18, 1982), better known by his stage name Ne-Yo, is an American Grammy Award winning R&B singer-songwriter, record producer, dancer and actor. Beginning his career as a songwriter, Ne-Yo penned the hit "Let Me Love You" for singer Mario. The single's successful release in the United States prompted an informal meeting between Ne-Yo and Def Jam's label head, and the signing of a recording contract.

Ne-Yo was born in Camden, Arkansas His mother is of African American and Chinese descent, and his father is African American. Both of his parents were musicians. As a young child, he was raised by his mother after she separated from his father. In hopes of better opportunity, his mother relocated the family to Las Vegas, Nevada. While in the Las Vegas Academy, Smith adopted the stage name "GoGo" and joined an R&B group called Envy. The group disbanded in 2000, and Smith continued to write songs for other artists before starting his solo career