On December 9, 1717, German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born. Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art.
On October 28, 1886, U.S. president Grover Cleveland, the former New York governor, presided the dedication ceremony of the Statue of Liberty, a gift to the United States from the people of France.
On January 10, 1938, computer scientist Donald Knuth, developer of the seminal computer science textbooks 'The Art of Computer Programming', was born. He is also widely known for his development of the TeX typesetting framework and the Metafont font definition language. Actually, Donald Knuth is one of my personal heroes in computer science. The very day I started to study this subject, his textbooks had already become a sort of 'holy bible' when it comes to algorithms and esp. the analysis of algorithms, i.e. the very heart of computer science. About the person behind the book, I almost knew next to nothing...