October 6 birthdays & history

Famous people born on October 6

• 1887Le Corbusier, Swiss-French architect and painter, designed the Philips Pavilion and Saint-Pierre, Firminy
• 1914Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian ethnographer and explorer
• 1903Ernest Walton, Irish physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1931Riccardo Giacconi, Italian-American astrophysicist and astronomer, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1831Richard Dedekind, German mathematician and philosopher
• 1906Janet Gaynor, American actress
• 1963Elisabeth Shue, American actress
• 1552Matteo Ricci, Italian priest and missionary
• 1908Carole Lombard, American actress
• 1820Jenny Lind, Swedish soprano and actress

What happened on October 6

• 1898Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the largest American music fraternity, is founded at the New England Conservatory of Music.
• 1903The High Court of Australia sits for the first time.
• 1910Eleftherios Venizelos is elected Prime Minister of Greece for the first of seven times.
• 1923The Turkish National Movement enters Constantinople.
• 1927The Jazz Singer, one of the first feature-length motion pictures with a synchronized recorded music score, was released.
• 1979Pope John Paul II becomes the first pontiff to visit the White House.
• 1987Fiji becomes a republic.
• 1990Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-41, and deploys the Ulysses space probe to study the Sun's polar regions.
• 1995Astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz reported the discovery of a planet orbiting 51 Pegasi as the first known exoplanet around a main-sequence star.
• 1995The first planet orbiting another sun, 51 Pegasi b, is discovered.
• 2007Jason Lewis completes the first human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth.
• 2010Instagram, a mainstream photo-sharing application, is founded.

Also observed on October 6

• World Space Week (October 4–10)
• German-American Day (United States)
• Teachers' Day (Sri Lanka)