Who/what is Google honoring today?

Here's the logo running over there:



Pause the cursor over it long enough and you'll see it's Hans Christian Ørsted. And who was he and what is that logo supposed to be:

... Google's Doodle logo illustrates his key discovery. That is, if you run a current through a wire – in this case, from the battery at the front – then the electricity creates a magnetic field, which will deflect a compass needle.

Thus the study of electromagnetism was born, and it's the basis of a lot of modern life: it led to the development of electricity generators and transformers....

As with many great discoveries, it happened by accident. In 1820, Ørsted, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, was preparing an evening lecture when he noticed that a compass needle moved away from magnetic north and pointed to the wire whenever current flowed from the battery....

To honour Ørsted, the scientific community named the unit of magnetic induction after him, in what we now call the CGS (centimetre-gram-second) system. Sadly for him, people no longer measure things in oersteds, because nowadays we use an international metric system (SI) that honours people such as Ampere, Ohm, Hertz, James Prescott Joule, James Watt and Michael Faraday instead.

Poor Ørsted. But if he only discovered it by accident, he's lucky he got as much glory as he did. And now he's got a new jolt of fame, from Google.

By the way, there was no Mr. Google. These days, we name things with words with think sound fun and exciting — Google, Yahoo, etc. — not after fusty old professors. But thanks to the old professor, nonetheless.