November of this year, 2026, is a good time to appreciate a prognostication paper published in the year 1960:
“Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026,” Heinz Von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora, and Lawrence W. Amiot, Science, vol. 132, no. 3436, 1960, pp. 1291-1295. The authors write: “At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia.”
Had they chosen to predict an earlier date, the three authors might have been good candidates to join the people who shared the 2011 Ig Nobel Mathematics Prize. That prize was awarded to Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.