March 19
In 1966 the Slovenian pop singer Anja Rupel was born. In 1983 Rupel became a lead singer of a Slovenian synth pop band Videosex, and five years later collaborated with Laibach in the second video embedded below.
March 20
In 2011 then Slovenian member of the European parliament Zoran Thaler got caught on camera agreeing to receive a bribe by Sunday Times journalists. Thaler later claimed that his cooperation was in fact part of his personal investigation into the lobbyists. In 2014 Thaler pleaded guilty to a corruption charge and got sentenced to two and a half years of (weekend) prison, a 32,250 EUR fine and a five-year ban from any public office.
March 21
In 1949 the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana. Žižek, one of the world’s best-known philosophers, also ran for the Slovenian presidency in 1990.
March 22
In 1875 Anton Codelli, a nobleman and inventor who spent most of his life in Ljubljana, was born in Naples. Codelli studied engineering in Vienna and after that moved to Ljubljana. Codelli’s inventions included establishing wireless telegraphic connections among the Austrian navy ships in the Adriatic, ships and their posts on the shore, as well as the latter with headquarters in Vienna. Furthermore, he established a wireless communication line between Berlin and the German colony of Togo in 1913, and even produced a feature film in Africa, White Goddess from Wangore, which was eventually lost. Codelli, however, is especially known for bringing the first car to Ljubljana in 1898.
March 23
In 1754, the Slovenian mathematician Jurij Vega was born in Zagorica above Dolsko. After completing his philosophy studies in Ljubljana, Vega was employed as an engineer for river transport on the rivers Sava and Ljubljanica. After that he joined the artillery and became an officer and math teacher at the artillery school in Ljubljana. In 1789 Vega beat the world record for calculating π up to its 140th decimal number, a record that stood for 52 years, until 1841. His most important work remains Thesaurus logarithmorum completes, a table of logarithms first published in 1794, which remained in use until the spread of computers.
The high school Gimnazija Jurija Vege in Idrija is named after him, as is the Vega Crater on the Moon and an asteroid called 14966 Jurijvega.
Vega impact Moon crater
March 24
In 1835 the physicist Jožef Štefan was born at St. Peter by Celovec (Klagenfurt). He is best known for his law on black body radiation, which is named after him and helped him present the first calculation of the temperature of the Sun’s surface. Very important is also his work in acoustics, electromagnetic equations and the kinetic energy of heat. The main national research institution in Ljubljana, the Jožef Štefan Institute, is named after him.
March 25
In 1913 the shoe company Peko was established in Tržič. The shoemaking started in Tržič in 1906, when Peter Kozina, a shoe trader, decided to start his own shoe business by the help of shoemakers in Tržič. In 1913 the company adopted its brand name Peko after the first two letters of his name and surname. The brand has been recently purchased by another shoe company, Alpina.
