May 7

The Bengali poet, composer and reformer of the Bengal Renaissance Rabindranath Tagore was born in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta.

The French architect-Egyptologist Jean-Philippe Lauer, who spent over seven decades excavating and restoring Djoser's Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara, was born in Paris.

Miguel Civil, later regarded as the world's foremost scholar of the Sumerian language, was born near Barcelona.

Nyogen Senzaki, a Rinzai Zen monk who was among the earliest proponents of Zen in the United States, died on this day in 1958.

Edwin Land was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. An inventor who held over five hundred patents, he developed practical light-polarizing filters and the instant camera that produced a finished photograph in about a minute.