April 26

Marcus Aurelius, the emperor remembered as a Stoic thinker and author of the Meditations, was born on this day in Rome.

Carsten Niebuhr, the surveyor whose exact copies of the Persepolis cuneiform inscriptions became a key to reading ancient Mesopotamian writing, died in 1815.

Hsuan Hua, the Chan master who helped establish Chinese Buddhism in the United States and founded the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, was born.

Benno Landsberger, regarded as one of the forefathers of Assyriology and Akkadian lexicography, died in 1968.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, the largely self-taught Indian mathematician whose results in number theory and infinite series still generate research, died in Kumbakonam in 1920.