Also on This Day in History January 21
Discover what happened on January 21 with HISTORY's summaries of major events, anniversaries,
famous births and notable deaths.
Births on This Day, January 21
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1857
Joseph Paxson Iddings
American geologist who advanced understanding in the field of petrology - the study of the origin, composition, structure, and alteration of rocks.
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1874
René-Louis Baire
French mathematician whose study of irrational numbers and whose concept to divide the notion of continuity into upper and lower semi-continuity greatly influenced the French School of Mathematics.
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1908
Bengt Strömgren
Bengt Georg Daniel Strömgren was a Danish astrophysicist who pioneered the present-day knowledge of the gas clouds in space.
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1887
Wolfgang Köhler
Russo-German-American psychologist who significantly developed Gestalt psychology, in which learning, perception, and other mental processes were studied incorporated as part of a structured whole.
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1743
John Fitch
American pioneer of steamboat transportation who produced serviceable steamboats before Robert Fulton.
Deaths on This Day, January 21
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1983
Solomon Spiegelman
American microbiologist and geneticist who discovered that only one of two strands of molecules that make up DNA, carried the genetic information to produce new substances.
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1926
Camillo Golgi
Italian physician and cytologist who, in 1873, published his key discovery, the use of silver salts to stain samples for microscope slides.
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1892
John Couch Adams
English astronomer and mathematician, one of two people who independently discovered the planet Neptune.
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1930
Hugh Longbourne Callendar
He was an English physicist who was famous for work in calorimetry, thermometry and especially, the thermodynamic properties of steam.
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1609
Joseph Justus Scaliger
French scholar who was one of the founders of the science of chronology.