You may have never heard Gioachino Rossini’s name before, but you have almost certainly heard his composition of The Barber of Seville; even Bugs Bunny has an adaptation of it.

The Italian composer would have been 220-years-old today and Google’s Doodle is honoring him with a leap year opera doodle. That’s right, it is February 29th today, a leap year so even though 220 years have passed, this is only the 53rd time Rossini’s birthday actual birthday has passed.

Leap years are every four years because we add a day to keep our calendar in sync. We count 365 days a year (except leap years with 357) because it takes the Earth roughly 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 16 seconds to orbit the sun.

Google’s first leap year doodle was in 2004 when they displayed one frog leaping over another. Their doodles have continued to be more and more elaborate since then.

You can see all the Google Doodles here.

Google changed the ‘tone’ of their logo Wednesday, ah, get it?

Okay, aside from bad jokes, Google is celebrating the 155th birthday of German physicist, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, by changing their logo to a frequency wave (you know, tone, derived from one frequency or a very small number of related frequencies… forget it).

The work of Hertz during his short life (he passed away at the age of only 36) is all around us, literally. His work helped pave the way for radio, television and WiFi.

At the time Hertz didn’t realize the importance of his work on the photoelectric effect and said that “it’s of no use whatsoever.”

“This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right — we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.”

Thirty-six years after his death, Hertz was honored by the International Electrotechnical Commission and to be named as the standard unit of measurement.

Hertz died in 1894 in Bonn, Germany.

More Google Doodle

Last month Google celebrated Charles Dickens 200th birthday with their Google Doodle. They also did a Valentine’s Day video.

You can check out all of the Google Doodles here.

Google and The University of Warwick are paying homage to the great British author, Charles Dickens, as he celebrates his his 200th birthday.

The University with a full-length documentary and an app that celebrates Dickens’ novels and adaptations of work. The app links to all kinds of different mediums including videos, articles and podcasts.

The University of Warwick’s Celebrating Dickens app links to podcasts, articles and videos on Victorian Britain, his novels and adaptations of his works. One of the Professors behind the app, Jon Mee, said: “The whole Celebrating Dickens project has been a fantastic way of showcasing Dickens to a wider audience.”

Google’s commemoration is by way of their trademarked, Google Doodle which showcases characters from his work including Great Expectations’, Pip, and Ebenezer Scrooge from The Christmas Carol.

Most of Dickens’ novels spoke of the hardships inflicted on the poor during industrial revolution creating characters like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.

He was born in Landport, Hampshire in England on February 7, 1812.