01 January: today's birthdays

• Maurice Béjart - French dancer and choreographer. He founded some of the most prestigious dance schools
• Jack Beresford - Former English rower 
• Davor Šuker - Former Croatian soccer player
• Pierre de Coubertin - French pedagogue and historian, founder of the Olympic Games, born Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin
• Willy den Ouden - Former Dutch swimmer
• Edward Morgan Forster - English author. The films Passage to India and A Room with a View are adaptations of his novels
• James Frazer - Scottish anthropologist and historian of religions
• Ludovic Halévy - French author and dramatist
• John Edgar Hoover - American politician
• Utagawa Kuniyoshi - Japanese artist, one of the great masters of the Japanese Ukiyo-e
• Christine Lagarde - French lawyer and politician, born Christine Madeleine Odette Lallouette. She is serving as the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund
• Michèle Mercier - French actress, born Jocelyne Yvonne Renée Mercier
• Michel Onfray - French philosopher
• Harold Adrian Russell Philby - English secret agent naturalized Soviet
• Lexi Randall - American actress
• Hasan Salihamidžić - Bosnian soccer player
• J. D. Salinger - Jerome David Salinger, American writer, author of The Catcher in the Rye
• L'Wren Scott - Stage name of Luann Bambrough, American model and fashion designer. She had a long relationships with Mick Jagger, lead vocalist and founder of rock group The Rolling Stones
• Vernon Lomax Smith - American professor of Economics, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, shared with Daniel Kahneman
• Alfred Stieglitz - American photographer
• Tignous - Pseudonym of Bernard Verlhac, French cartoonist killed during a terrorist attack on satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo
• Shinya Tsukamoto - Japanese film director and actor
• Spencer Tunick - American photographer
• Louis Vauxcelles - French art critic