September 28

Samuel Noah Kramer, a foremost scholar of Sumerian literature and author of 'History Begins at Sumer,' was born in Zashkiv, then in the Russian Empire.

Pope John Paul I died in the Vatican after a reign of thirty-three days, one of the shortest in papal history.

Louis Pasteur, the French chemist whose work on microbes underpinned pasteurization, germ theory and vaccines against anthrax and rabies, died near Paris.

The American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who showed that galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way and that more distant ones recede faster, died in San Marino, California.