September 14

Cyprian, bishop of Carthage and an influential early Latin theologian, was beheaded during the Valerian persecution.

The Constantinople preacher and Church Father John Chrysostom died at Comana Pontica while being led to his place of banishment.

Jean-Francois Champollion grasped the phonetic principle behind Egyptian hieroglyphs, reportedly crying out that he had it, the breakthrough that reopened three millennia of Egyptian writing.

Mohammed Arkoun, an Algerian-French scholar known for applying modern critical methods to the history of Islamic thought, died on this day in 2010.

The German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose measurements across the Americas helped found biogeography and the systematic study of the Earth, was born in Berlin.

The twin LIGO observatories recorded GW150914, the first direct detection of gravitational waves, from two merging black holes far across the universe, confirming a century-old prediction of general relativity.