April 29

Catherine of Siena, mystic and prolific letter-writer later named a Doctor of the Church, died in Rome at the age of thirty-three.

Anagarika Dharmapala, the Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalist and founder of the Maha Bodhi Society, died at Sarnath, India.

Henri Poincaré, the French mathematician who shaped topology, celestial mechanics and the ideas behind chaos theory, was born in Nancy in 1854.