May 23

Leo Baeck, the liberal rabbi and theologian who led German Jewry through the Nazi era, was born in Lissa, Prussia (now Leszno, Poland).

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced to the Knesset that Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial in Israel.

The Dominican friar and preacher Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

Reginald Campbell Thompson, the British Assyriologist and cuneiformist who excavated Nineveh, died at Moulsford, Berkshire.

Carl Linnaeus was born in Råshult, Sweden. His systematic binomial naming of living things gave the sciences of botany and zoology their enduring two-word system for identifying every species.

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He remains the only person awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, honored for the transistor and later for the theory of superconductivity.