August 9

Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski of Vilna, one of the foremost halakhic authorities of his generation, died after decades leading its rabbinical court.

The Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, patron of the Baghdad translation movement and its House of Wisdom, died while on campaign near Tarsus.

Edith Stein, a philosopher who became a Discalced Carmelite nun, was killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mahmoud Darwish, among the most celebrated modern Arabic-language poets, died after heart surgery in Houston, Texas.

Amedeo Avogadro, the Italian scientist whose hypothesis that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of molecules became foundational to chemistry, was born in Turin.

Three days after Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki; Japan announced its surrender days later, ending the Second World War.