Portal:Biography/Selected anniversaries/August 12

Births

 * 1880 - Radclyffe Hall, British author (d. 1943)
 * 1887 - Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate (d. 1961)
 * 1904 - Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia (d. 1918)
 * 1924 - Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, leader of Pakistan (d. 1988)
 * 1930 - George Soros, American businessman
 * 1931 - William Goldman, American screenwriter (d. 2018)
 * 1949 - Mark Knopfler, British guitarist (Dire Straits)
 * 1954 - Pat Metheny, American guitarist
 * 1971 - Pete Sampras, American tennis player
 * 1977 - Jesper Grønkjær, Danish soccer player

Deaths

 * 30 BC - Cleopatra (b. 69 BC)
 * 1848 - George Stephenson, British locomotive designer (b. 1781)
 * 1865 - William Jackson Hooker, English botanist (b. 1785)
 * 1955 - Thomas Mann, (pictured) German writer, Nobel Prize Laureate (b. 1875)
 * 1973 - Karl Ziegler, German chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate (b. 1898)