15 October: today's birthdays

• Italo Calvino - Italian writer. He wrote the trilogy Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The Nonexistent Knight), the collections of short stories Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City and Cosmicomics
• Didier Deschamps - Former French soccer player
• Michel Foucault - French philosopher and historian. He wrote Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge
• John Kenneth Galbraith - Canadian-born economist and politician. He wrote American Capitalism, The Affluent Society, and The New Industrial State
• Matteo Garrone - Italian film director and screenwriter. He directed The Embalmer, First Love, and Gomorrah 
• Asaph Hall - American astronomer
• Andy Holmes - English athlete
• Ernst Kapp - German philosopher and geographer
• Mikhail Lermontov - Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian writer, poet and painter who is considered the greatest figure in Russian Romanticism. He is best known for his poetry and the novel A Hero of Our Time, which is considered to be the founding stone of the psychological novel in Russia.
  The correct pronunciation of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov is Me-ha-yil Yu-rye-veech Yehr-mohn-tof.
• Philippe Leroy - French actor. He lived mostly in Italy where he is famous for his role as Yanez in the Italian TV series Sandokan, based on Emilio Salgari's novels Le Tigri di Mompracem e I pirati della Malesia
• Yoko Maki - Japanese actress, born Yoko Kanamori 
• Felipe Mattioni Rohde - Brazilian soccer player
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - German philosopher, philologist, poet, cultural critic, composer and often wrote through the use of aphorisms. Some of the most noted texts he wrote are Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.
  To aid pronunciation for English-speakers, the phonetic transcription of his name can be written as Free-dreek Veel-helm Knee-chuh. Whilst the phonetic transliteration for Friedrich and Wilhelm are quite straightforward to pronounce, Nietzsche is more complicated. The "uh" sound at the end of Knee-chuh actually sounds midway between an "ah" and "eh". An example of this sound in the English language can be found at the beginning of the word "apart". If you pronounce the "a" at the beginning of apart, on its own, that is very close to the sound of the "e" at the end of Nietzsche.
• Günther Oettinger - German politician, born Günther Hermann Oettinger. He is currently serving as the European Commissioner for Budget and Human Resources
• Mesut Özil - German footballer
• Mario Puzo - Italian American author and screenwriter. He wrote the novel The Godfather, which was adapted into the film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola
• Paul Reynaud - French politician. He was the Prime Minister of France
• Evangelista Torricelli - Italian mathematician and physicist
• P.G. Wodehouse - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, English novelist. He created the fictional character Reginald Jeeves, the perfect valet of a lazy Londoner gentleman, which appeared for the first time in the novel The Man with Two Left Feet
• Pelham Grenville Wodehouse - English novelist best known as P.G. Wodehouse. He created the fictional character Reginald Jeeves, the perfect valet of a lazy Londoner gentleman, which appeared for the first time in the novel The Man with Two Left Feet