› added 5 months ago

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TIL Leonhard Euler wrote 234 letters to 15 year old German Princess Friederike Charlotte over a period of two years in order to teach her math, physics, and sciences. These letters were later reprinted as a textbook for "every female academy in the kingdom"

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via reddit.com

JYZwQ TIL “Katamari Damacy” translates literally to “clump of souls”
M7YvK TIL Charles Darwin's tortoise lived to be 175, and was owned By Steve Irwin when she died - two and a half months before Irwin's own tragic death
aw68A TIL about John Sedgwick a US general who asked his men during a battle "Why are you ducking? They couldn't hit an elephant from this distance." Sedgwick was shot under the left eye by an enemy sharpshooter as he finished the sentence.
KYJKQ TIL Since dissecting human corpses was a taboo in the greco-roman world, Galens used Macaque Monkeys to study human anatomy, as he thought them to be the most anatomicaly similar to humans out of all the animal species he knew. This led to some errors, as they were less similar than he thought
KO4dJ TIL Audi did not widely adopt airbags until 1994, but rather used a system called Procon-ten. In a collision the system would pull the steering column away from the driver using a series of cables.