Shortly before 3 a.m. on May 13, 1909, 127 cyclists rolled away from the Loreto district of Milan into the cold dark of pre-dawn Lombardy on the first stage of the inaugural Giro d'Italia, the eight-stage 2,448 km (1,521 mile) tour of Italy that has been run almost annually ever since (with breaks only for the two world wars) and is one of the three Grand Tours of professional cycling, alongside the Tour de France (founded 1903) and the Vuelta a Espana (founded 1935). The race had been organised by the Milanese sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport, conceived in part as a circulation-builder against the rival paper Il Corriere della Sera, which had threatened to launch its own race first. The route ran Milan-Bologna-Chieti-Naples-Rome-Florence-Genoa-Turin-Milan, finishing in Milan on May 30. The first overall winner was the 26-year-old Italian cyclist Luigi Ganna of the Atala-Continental team, who won three of the eight stages and earned 5,325 lire (against the average Italian factory worker's 100 lire a year). Of the 127 starters only 49 finished. The Giro's leader's jersey is pink (the maglia rosa) — chosen for the colour of the founding sponsor La Gazzetta dello Sport, which since 1899 has printed its newspaper on pink paper. Today's Giro is contested over 21 stages and roughly 3,500 km in late May and early June, with the maglia rosa worn by the overall classification leader; the maglia ciclamino (cyclamen) for the points classification, the maglia azzurra (blue) for the King of the Mountains, and the maglia bianca (white) for the best young rider.

At about midday on Sunday, May 13, 1917, three shepherd children — Lucia dos Santos, age 10, and her cousins Francisco Marto, age 9, and Jacinta Marto, age 7 — were tending their families' sheep at the Cova da Iria (Cove of Irene), a hollow in the hills above their village of Aljustrel near Fatima, central Portugal, when (according to their account) they were astonished by two flashes of lightning from a clear sky and saw above a small holm-oak tree "a Lady all of light, more brilliant than the sun." The Lady, who later identified herself as "the Lady of the Rosary," instructed them to come to the same place on the 13th of each month. She appeared again on June 13, July 13, August 19 (the children were under arrest by the local anti-clerical mayor on August 13), September 13, and finally October 13, 1917 — when an estimated 70,000 pilgrims and journalists gathered in pouring rain witnessed the so-called Miracle of the Sun (the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun appeared to spin in the sky and approach the earth — accounts of which were carried in the secular Portuguese press). Francisco and Jacinta died in the Spanish Influenza pandemic — Francisco on April 4, 1919 and Jacinta on February 20, 1920 — both as the Lady had foretold. Sister Lucia entered the Discalced Carmelite convent at Coimbra in 1948 and lived to age 97, dying February 13, 2005. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima at the Cova da Iria is today the busiest Marian pilgrimage site in the world after Lourdes, drawing 4–6 million pilgrims a year. Pope John Paul II made three pilgrimages there (1982, 1991, 2000) — and on May 13, 2017, Pope Francis canonised Francisco and Jacinta Marto at Fatima itself: the youngest non-martyr saints ever canonised by the Catholic Church.

On May 13, 1940, in a field beside the Vought-Sikorsky factory at Stratford, Connecticut, the 50-year-old Russian-American aviation pioneer Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky lifted off the ground in his VS-300 — the first practical, single-main-rotor, single-tail-rotor helicopter — for what is recognised as the world's first untethered free flight of a fully practical single-rotor helicopter. The aircraft had made its first tethered hop on September 14, 1939, but had been kept on the ground by safety cables for the eight months of testing that followed. Sikorsky himself was at the controls (he flew most of the early test flights, in business suit, fedora, and bow-tie — the canonical photographs are unforgettable); the aircraft hovered, performed forward, sideways, and rearward flight, and demonstrated the configuration that became the design standard for nearly every helicopter built ever since. Born May 25, 1889 in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), Sikorsky had earlier designed the world's first four-engined airliner the Russky Vityaz (1913) and the Ilya Muromets bomber (1914), the first heavy bombers ever built, before fleeing the Russian Revolution and emigrating to the United States in 1919. He founded Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation in 1923, was absorbed into United Aircraft (later United Technologies) in 1929, and produced the famous Sikorsky S-42 "Pan Am Clipper" flying boats of the 1930s. The VS-300 design directly led to the Sikorsky R-4 (1942), the world's first production helicopter and the first helicopter to enter service with the United States military and the Royal Air Force. Sikorsky died at Easton, Connecticut on October 26, 1972, age 83. The VS-300 itself is preserved at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

On May 13, 1950, at the disused RAF Silverstone airfield in Northamptonshire, England, the inaugural Formula One World Championship race — the 1950 British Grand Prix, "Grand Prix d'Europe" honours — was won by the 43-year-old Italian driver Giuseppe "Nino" Farina at the wheel of an Alfa Romeo 158 in 2 hours, 13 minutes, 23.6 seconds, at an average speed of 90.95 mph (146.37 km/h). The race attracted 21 entries, 21 starters, and a crowd estimated at 150,000 (including the reigning King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth II as Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret — making it also the first and only Formula One race to be attended by a reigning British monarch). The Alfa Romeo "Alfettas" — designed by the legendary Gioacchino Colombo and ridden by the so-called "Three Fs" of Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, and Luigi Fagioli — finished 1-2-3, lapping every other car. The race ran 70 laps over the 4.649 km (2.889 mile) airfield circuit. Six other rounds followed in 1950 — at Monaco, Indianapolis (which counted for World Championship points until 1960 despite using completely different cars and rules), Berne, Spa-Francorchamps, Reims-Gueux, and Monza — and Farina won the inaugural Drivers' World Championship from Fangio and Fagioli, with Alfa Romeo taking what was not yet officially called the Constructors' Championship. Today the Formula One World Championship is the most-watched annual sporting series on earth: 24 races a year, audiences of 1.5 billion across the season, and revenues of more than $3 billion. Farina, who won three Grands Prix and the 1950 title, retired after the 1955 season and was killed in a road accident in France in June 1966.

On May 13, 1967, in the Durbar Hall of Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, Dr. Zakir Husain — economist, educationist, and former Vice-President — was sworn in by Chief Justice K. Subba Rao as the third President of India, the first Muslim to hold the office. Born in Hyderabad State on February 8, 1897, into a Pashtun family of Afghan ancestry, he studied at the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College (now Aligarh Muslim University) and went on to take his doctorate in economics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin in 1926, with a thesis on the agrarian economy of British India. Returning to India, he became one of the chief architects of Mahatma Gandhi's Wardha Scheme of basic education (Nai Talim, 1937) and served as the founding Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia (1948–56), the Muslim University-turned-national-institution he had helped save in the 1920s. He was Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University from 1956 to 1958, Governor of Bihar from 1957 to 1962, and Vice-President of India from 1962 to 1967 (under Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Indira Gandhi's early premiership). Awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 and the Bharat Ratna — India's highest civilian honour — in 1963, before his presidency. As President he served only 22 months: he died in office of a heart attack on May 3, 1969, age 72, the first Indian President to die in office. He is buried on the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. The Government of India's Zakir Husain Award for Mass Communication and Aligarh's Zakir Husain College of Engineering and Technology are named for him.

On the morning of May 13, 1985, after a 14-hour siege that included the firing of more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition by Philadelphia police, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped two pounds of military-grade FBI-supplied C-4 plastic explosive (mixed with Tovex water-gel) from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter onto the rooftop bunker of 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia — the headquarters of the Black-liberation, anti-government, back-to-nature group MOVE, founded by John Africa (born Vincent Leaphart) in 1972. The resulting explosion ignited a fire on the row-house roof; Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor ordered firefighters to "let the fire burn" rather than risk further confrontation. The fire spread along the row of houses for the next four hours, eventually destroying 61 homes on Osage Avenue and Pine Street and leaving more than 250 people homeless. Eleven members of MOVE were killed: founder John Africa, five other adults, and five children aged 7 to 13. Only two people from inside the house survived: 13-year-old Birdie Africa (Michael Ward) and Ramona Africa, who later sued the city. The Philadelphia mayor at the time, W. Wilson Goode — the city's first Black mayor — appointed the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission (the "MOVE Commission"), which in March 1986 condemned the bombing as "unconscionable." No criminal charges were ever brought against any city official. The City of Philadelphia paid more than $40 million in civil settlements. In May 2020 the City Council formally apologised on the 35th anniversary of the bombing. It is the only known case of a U.S. police department deliberately dropping a bomb on an American residential neighbourhood from the air.

At 17:00 on May 13, 1989, two days before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was due to arrive in Beijing for the first Sino-Soviet summit in 30 years (the visit that would, by Western convention, also formally mark the end of the Sino-Soviet split), an estimated 2,000 student protesters from Beijing's major universities — led by Wuer Kaixi (Beijing Normal University), Chai Ling (Beijing Normal University), and Wang Dan (Beijing University) — began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square at the heart of the Chinese capital, in front of the Mao mausoleum and the Great Hall of the People. Their two demands: a televised public dialogue with the Chinese government on equal terms, and a formal retraction of the People's Daily editorial of April 26, 1989 that had condemned the protests as "turmoil." Within days the hunger strike had grown to more than 3,000 students, then 10,000, then more than a million Beijing citizens marching in solidarity. The hunger strike was the moment that transformed the Tiananmen movement — which had begun on April 15, 1989, the day after the death of the reformist former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang — from a student protest into a broad social uprising. It humiliated the Chinese government during Gorbachev's visit (the formal welcoming ceremony for Gorbachev had to be moved from Tiananmen Square, and many of his appointments inside the city had to be cancelled or rerouted). General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who supported a dialogue with the students, lost the internal Politburo struggle to Premier Li Peng and paramount leader Deng Xiaoping; martial law was declared on May 20; the People's Liberation Army moved into Beijing on the night of June 3–4 and ended the protest by force. Wuer Kaixi and Chai Ling escaped abroad through the Hong Kong-based "Operation Yellowbird" smuggling network. Wang Dan was imprisoned for seven years and is now an academic in Taiwan. June 4 has been a forbidden date in mainland China ever since.

At about 11:00 a.m. local time on May 13, 1995, the 33-year-old British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves — born in Mickleover, Derby on February 17, 1962 — reached the 8,848.86-metre summit of Mount Everest entirely alone, without supplementary oxygen, without Sherpa support of any kind, and without using any fixed ropes that other climbers had not pre-rigged on the mountain — the FIRST woman in the history of mountaineering to do so. (The New Zealander Lydia Bradey had reached the summit oxygenless in 1988 but with team support; the Slovak Stane Belak was the first man oxygenless and unsupported, in 1988.) Her summit took place during her solo "Trinity Project" — her plan to summit unaided and without oxygen the three highest mountains on earth: Everest (8,848 m, May 1995), K2 (8,611 m), and Kangchenjunga (8,586 m). She made her descent safely. Three months later, on August 13, 1995, on the descent from the summit of K2 — which she had also reached unaided and without oxygen — she and four other climbers were swept off the South-South-East Ridge of K2 by a sudden hurricane-force windstorm; her body was discovered by a Spanish expedition the following season at the Diamir Face below the summit. She was 33. She is survived by her two children, Tom and Kate; Tom Ballard would himself become a celebrated solo mountaineer before he too died on the unclimbed central Mummery Spur of Nanga Parbat in February 2019. She is regarded as the most accomplished British female mountaineer of the late 20th century and remains one of only a handful of women to have ever summited Everest unaided and without oxygen.

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan, born at 8 Bolwell Terrace, Lambeth, London, the son of an Irish-born military bandmaster — English composer best known for his 14 collaborations with the librettist W. S. Gilbert, the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that defined English-language comic opera, the foundation of the modern Broadway and West End musical, and the most popular theatrical entertainments of the late Victorian era. Educated at the Chapel Royal, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and the Leipzig Conservatory under Ignaz Moscheles, Carl Reinecke, and Moritz Hauptmann (1858–61, where he met Brahms and Liszt), he established his early reputation with the incidental music to Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (1861, completed at age 19), the song "The Lost Chord" (1877, the most popular parlour song of the late Victorian period), the orchestral overture "Di ballo" (1870), and the Anglican hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" (1871, written to fit the words of Sabine Baring-Gould). His G&S collaborations with William Schwenck Gilbert — produced under the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte at the Savoy Theatre, London — include "Trial by Jury" (1875), "H.M.S. Pinafore" (1878), "The Pirates of Penzance" (1879), "Patience" (1881), "Iolanthe" (1882), "Princess Ida" (1884), "The Mikado" (1885 — their greatest commercial success and one of the most-performed operettas in the English-speaking world), "Ruddigore" (1887), "The Yeomen of the Guard" (1888), "The Gondoliers" (1889), "Utopia, Limited" (1893), and "The Grand Duke" (1896). Knighted by Queen Victoria in 1883. Conducted the first English performance of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" (1885); wrote the Imperial Edward March for the coronation of Edward VII; conducted the music for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. He died in London on November 22, 1900, age 58, of heart and lung disease, and is buried at St. Paul's Cathedral.

Georges Braque, born at Argenteuil-sur-Seine, Val-d'Oise (the same Paris suburb where Monet had painted his famous floating water-lily-and-bridge series), the son of a house-painter and decorator who taught him the trade — French painter who, with Pablo Picasso during their intense five-year working partnership of 1909–14, invented the most influential art movement of the 20th century: Cubism. Trained as a painter-decorator in Le Havre and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1902–04), he began his career as a Fauvist painter in the bright clear style of Henri Matisse and Andre Derain. In 1907, after seeing Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in the Bateau-Lavoir studio in Montmartre, he reoriented his entire approach. The two artists met daily at Picasso's Bateau-Lavoir studio for the next seven years and, in Picasso's later phrase, "were like climbers roped together on a mountain." The early canvases of Analytic Cubism (1909–11) — "Houses at L'Estaque" (1908, the first of the breakthrough Cubist landscapes), "Violin and Pitcher" (1910), "The Portuguese" (1911), "Man with a Guitar" (1911) — fragmented the perspectival space of European painting into shards of overlapping planes and reassembled it in something completely new. In 1912 Braque invented papier collé (the inclusion of pasted real paper in a painting), which immediately led him and Picasso to invent collage. He was severely wounded at Carency in May 1915 (a head wound that left him partially blinded for months) and discharged from the French army. After the war he returned to a more lyrical, decorative, but still recognisably Cubist style — figures, still lifes, the great series of "Studios" (1949–56), and the "Birds" of his last years. Awarded the Legion of Honour in 1951 (Commandeur 1956), he was the first living artist to have his work exhibited at the Louvre (1961). He died in Paris on August 31, 1963, age 81. Buried in the cemetery of the Eglise Saint-Valery, Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy.

Dame Daphne du Maurier, born at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the second of three daughters of the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and the actress Muriel Beaumont, granddaughter of the Punch cartoonist George du Maurier (author of "Trilby"), and cousin of the five Llewelyn Davies boys whom J.M. Barrie immortalised as "the boys" of "Peter Pan" — English novelist whose atmospheric, psychologically charged Cornish-set fiction made her one of the most popular British novelists of the 20th century and the subject of three of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest films. Her first novel "The Loving Spirit" (1931) was followed by "Jamaica Inn" (1936, smugglers on Bodmin Moor), "Rebecca" (1938, the great Manderley novel — "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" — over four million copies sold in her lifetime), "Frenchman's Creek" (1941), "Hungry Hill" (1943), "The King's General" (1946), "My Cousin Rachel" (1951), and the Kentish ghost-story collection "The Apple Tree" (1952), which contains her now-most-famous short story "The Birds." Hitchcock filmed three of her works: "Jamaica Inn" (1939, with Charles Laughton), "Rebecca" (1940, with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine — winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture), "The Birds" (1963, with Tippi Hedren). The 1973 Nicolas Roeg-directed "Don't Look Now" with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie — based on her 1971 short story — is widely regarded as one of the great horror films. Her two volumes of memoirs — "Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer" (1977) and "Myself When Young" (1977) — and her biographies of Branwell Bronte ("The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte," 1960) and Sir Francis Bacon ("The Winding Stair," 1976) are also distinguished works. Created Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1969. She lived for most of her adult life at Menabilly, the requisitioned Cornish manor house that was the model for Manderley in "Rebecca." She died at her home Kilmarth, near Par, Cornwall on April 19, 1989, age 81.

Harvey Keitel, born in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York, the son of Polish and Romanian Jewish immigrants Miriam (a milliner) and Harry Keitel (a hat-maker who ran a luncheonette) — American actor who became one of the central figures of 1970s American New Hollywood cinema and one of the most distinctive character leads of the late 20th century. After three years in the U.S. Marine Corps (he served in Lebanon during the 1958 Lebanon crisis) and a decade as a court stenographer in Manhattan while taking acting classes with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at the Actors Studio, he was cast in 1965 — at 26, in his very first professional acting job — by the unknown 23-year-old NYU film student Martin Scorsese in the student short "Who's That Knocking at My Door" (1967, eventually released as a feature). Their resulting six-decade collaboration produced "Mean Streets" (1973, as the conflicted small-time hood Charlie Cappa, opposite Robert De Niro), "Taxi Driver" (1976, as the New York pimp "Sport"), "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988, as Judas Iscariot), and a half-dozen other Scorsese films. His other major roles include Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" (1992, as Mr. White, the role he himself helped finance and produce), "Pulp Fiction" (1994, as the cleaner Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe), Ridley Scott's "Thelma & Louise" (1991, as Detective Hal Slocumb), Jane Campion's "The Piano" (1993, opposite Holly Hunter — Best Picture Cannes), Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant" (1992, as the unnamed protagonist — the most extreme performance of his career), and Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014). Also a long-time president of the Actors Studio (1995–98 with Estelle Parsons and Mark Rydell). Two-time Golden Globe nominee, BAFTA nominee, Cannes Best Actor nominee. Has been married three times; with the actress Lorraine Bracco he had a daughter, the actress Stella Keitel.

Dennis Keith Rodman, born in Trenton, New Jersey, the eldest of three children of an Air Force father (Philander Rodman Jr., who later abandoned the family and is reported to have fathered 47 children with various partners in the United States and the Philippines, where he lived from the 1970s) — American basketball player who became one of the greatest defensive and rebounding specialists in the history of the National Basketball Association and one of the most flamboyantly eccentric superstars in American sport. After a peripatetic high-school and college career — he grew nine inches between his last year of high school and his second year of college — he was drafted by the Detroit Pistons in the second round of the 1986 NBA Draft. Played for the Pistons (1986–93, two NBA Championships in 1989 and 1990 with the "Bad Boys"), the San Antonio Spurs (1993–95, NBA All-Defensive First Team and Defensive Player of the Year), the Chicago Bulls (1995–98, three NBA Championships in 1996, 1997, 1998 alongside Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen — the "second three-peat"), and brief later stints with the Los Angeles Lakers and the Dallas Mavericks. Two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year (1990, 1991); seven consecutive NBA rebounding titles (1992–98 — a feat matched only by Wilt Chamberlain); two-time NBA All-Star; seven-time All-Defensive First Team. Off-court, his cross-dressing wedding dress at his 1996 book launch, his self-published autobiography "Bad As I Wanna Be" (1996), his hair colours, his piercings, his marriage of nine days to Carmen Electra (1998), and his unusual diplomatic friendship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (he has visited Pyongyang more than half a dozen times since 2013, calling Kim "a friend for life") have made him a permanent fixture of American tabloid and political coverage. Inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Robert Douglas Thomas Pattinson, born in Barnes, southwest London, the youngest of three children of the model Clare Charlton and the vintage-car importer Richard Pattinson — English actor who, after global teen-idol fame as the vampire Edward Cullen in the five "Twilight" films (2008–12), reinvented himself as one of the most acclaimed and unconventional character actors of his generation, working primarily with international auteur directors. Educated at the Tower House School and the Harrodian School in London, he began modelling at age 12, was cast in his first significant role as Cedric Diggory in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (2005, killed by Voldemort in the third act of the film), and was cast in "Twilight" (2008) opposite Kristen Stewart in the role that defined the rest of his early career — the four "Twilight Saga" sequels (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) collectively grossed more than $3.4 billion worldwide. Determined to build a more serious filmography, he then chose almost exclusively to work with prestige directors on small films: David Cronenberg ("Cosmopolis," 2012; "Maps to the Stars," 2014), Werner Herzog ("Queen of the Desert," 2015), Anton Corbijn ("Life," 2015), James Gray ("The Lost City of Z," 2016), the Safdie Brothers ("Good Time," 2017 — for which he was widely regarded as the best male lead at Cannes), Claire Denis ("High Life," 2018), Robert Eggers ("The Lighthouse," 2019, opposite Willem Dafoe), Christopher Nolan ("Tenet," 2020), Matt Reeves ("The Batman," 2022, the role of Bruce Wayne / Batman), and Bong Joon-ho ("Mickey 17," 2025). He has been engaged to the British singer-songwriter Suki Waterhouse since 2023; their first daughter was born in March 2024.

Jean Leopold Nicolas Frederic Cuvier, known as Georges Cuvier, died of cholera in Paris during the great cholera epidemic of 1832, age 62 — French naturalist, zoologist, and paleontologist universally regarded as the founder of paleontology and comparative anatomy, and the principal architect of the European understanding of the fossil record before Darwin. Born August 23, 1769 in Montbeliard, then in the Duchy of Wurttemberg (today in eastern France), he was educated at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart on a ducal scholarship (1784–88) and worked as a private tutor in Normandy through the French Revolutionary years before being summoned to Paris in 1795 — at age 26 — by the Abbe Tessier on the strength of his anatomical drawings. He was made assistant to the chair of comparative anatomy at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, where he spent the rest of his life. From the late 1790s through the 1810s he produced the foundational works that founded paleontology as a science: the Annales du Museum (1802–13), "Lecons d'anatomie comparee" (1800–05), and the magisterial four-volume "Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupedes" (1812, expanded to seven volumes 1821–24) — the first systematic descriptions of the fossil mammoth, mastodon, megatherium, ichthyosaur, plesiosaur, pterodactyl, and most of the other extinct mammals and reptiles known at the time. He was the first to demonstrate, against the pre-Revolutionary scientific consensus, that EXTINCTION was a real and recurring fact of natural history (he showed this for the mammoth and mastodon by rigorous comparative anatomy); the first to propose that the geological record was punctuated by repeated catastrophes that had wiped out earlier faunas (the doctrine of "catastrophism," opposed to Charles Lyell's later "uniformitarianism"); and the founder of the great natural-history collections that today fill the Galerie de Paleontologie of the Paris Museum. He was elevated to the French peerage by Louis-Philippe in 1831. Charles Darwin, who later disagreed with Cuvier about evolution, nevertheless described his "Recherches" as one of the great works of 19th-century science. The dinosaur "Pterodactylus cuvieri" and the mineral "cuvierite" are named for him.

Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich — better known by his pseudonym Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish for "peace be upon you," the traditional Hebrew greeting) — died of tuberculosis and diabetes in his apartment at 968 Kelly Street in the Bronx, New York, age 57. His funeral on May 17, 1916 in lower Manhattan drew an estimated 100,000 mourners along the route — at the time, the largest funeral in New York City's history — and his Yiddish epitaph (composed by himself before his death) was set in the gates of the Mount Carmel cemetery in Queens. Sholem Aleichem was the principal Yiddish-language writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — known in the Yiddish world as "the Jewish Mark Twain" (and indeed Mark Twain, on meeting him in New York, reciprocated by calling himself "the American Sholem Aleichem"). Born March 2, 1859 in Pereyaslav, a small town in the Pale of Settlement in central Ukraine of the Russian Empire, the son of a small-businessman who was alternately wealthy and bankrupt, he received a traditional cheder Jewish education and a Russian-language gymnasium education before working as a private tutor. From 1883 he wrote prolifically in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew; from the 1890s exclusively in Yiddish — the language of the Eastern European Jewish masses, which he, more than any other writer, raised to a serious literary medium. His monk-cycle of short stories about Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman, 1894–1916) — about a poor Ukrainian-Jewish milkman in the imaginary shtetl of Anatevka who must marry off his five daughters in the increasingly hostile world of late-Tsarist Russia — became, in adapted English-language form, the basis of the 1964 Broadway musical "Fiddler on the Roof" (book by Joseph Stein, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick), one of the longest-running and most-performed musicals of the 20th century, the 1971 Norman Jewison film, and a worldwide cultural touchstone for the lost world of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewry. He fled the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, lived in Switzerland and Germany, and emigrated to New York in 1914. The annual "Yom Sholem Aleichem" — the Yiddish-language reading of his works on his yahrzeit — has been observed by Yiddish-speaking communities in New York, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, and Moscow ever since.

Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen died of a heart attack at his home Polhogda outside Oslo, age 68 — Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian, and the most internationally celebrated Norwegian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born October 10, 1861 at Store Froen near Christiania (now Oslo), an athletic prodigy (he set 12 world skiing and skating records as a teenager), he led the first crossing of the Greenland ice sheet on skis in 1888, and from 1893 to 1896 led the famous Fram expedition — drifting his purpose-built wooden ship Fram, frozen into the Arctic ice pack, with the Trans-Polar Drift. When the drift turned out to be more southerly than he had hoped, he and Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen set out from the Fram with 28 dogs in March 1895 in an attempt to reach the North Pole on foot and by sledge. They reached 86°13.6'N on April 7, 1895 — at that point the highest northern latitude ever attained, three degrees of latitude further north than any human had ever been. They returned via Franz Josef Land. After his exploring career he became Professor of Oceanography at the University of Christiania (1908) and from 1906 to 1908 was Norway's first envoy to Britain after the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905. From 1920 to 1930 — increasingly the towering moral figure of Geneva — he served as the League of Nations' first High Commissioner for Refugees, organising the repatriation of an estimated 450,000 prisoners of war from World War I from across the new Soviet Union and Central Europe; the relief effort during the great Russian famine of 1921 (which alone is reckoned to have saved between 7 and 22 million lives); the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923; and the introduction of the "Nansen passport," the international travel document for stateless refugees that more than 450,000 refugees used to cross borders in the 1920s and 1930s. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922. Buried at Polhogda. The Fridtjof Nansen International Office for Refugees received the Nobel Peace Prize again in 1938. The "Nansen Medal" of UNHCR is the highest international award for service to refugees.

Frank James "Gary" Cooper died of cancer at his home in Beverly Hills, age 60 — American actor whose 36-year film career and 84 films made him one of the defining American leading men of the studio era and a personification of the strong-silent-American archetype. Born May 7, 1901 in Helena, Montana, the second son of an English-immigrant lawyer and Montana Supreme Court Justice, he attended Wesleyan College, England (1909–12) and Grinnell College in Iowa, worked as a Yellowstone tour-bus driver and political cartoonist before drifting to Los Angeles in 1924 and finding work as a movie extra and stuntman. His first leading role was in "The Winning of Barbara Worth" (1926). His breakthrough came with the lead in Josef von Sternberg's "Morocco" (1930) opposite Marlene Dietrich, and the title role in Henry Hathaway's "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" (1935). Two-time Best Actor Oscar winner: for "Sergeant York" (1941, the World War I biopic of Tennessee marksman Alvin York, his first Oscar) and "High Noon" (1952, as Marshal Will Kane in the iconic real-time western that ran 84 minutes — the running time being also the on-screen elapsed time — directed by Fred Zinnemann). His other major films include Frank Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936, Best Actor nomination — the role that made his name a Capra-American synonym), "The Plainsman" (1936), "Beau Geste" (1939), "Meet John Doe" (1941), "Ball of Fire" (1941), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1943, opposite Ingrid Bergman, Best Picture nominee), "The Pride of the Yankees" (1942, as the dying Lou Gehrig), Howard Hawks's "The Fountainhead" (1949, as Howard Roark), Anthony Mann's "Man of the West" (1958, his late-career masterpiece), and "Friendly Persuasion" (1956). He received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1961, accepted on his behalf by his close friend James Stewart at the 33rd Academy Awards on April 17, 1961 — the audience knew, from Stewart's emotion, that Cooper was dying. He died less than a month later. Buried at Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Cemetery, Southampton, New York.

Hans Ruedi "H.R." Giger died from injuries sustained in a fall down the stairs of his Zurich-Oerlikon home, age 74 — Swiss visual artist and set designer whose nightmarish biomechanical airbrush paintings — fusing organic forms (human bodies, foetuses, vertebrae, viscera) with mechanical forms (pipes, joints, machinery, weapons) — defined an entire dark-aesthetic of late-20th-century horror, science fiction, and heavy-metal album cover art. Born February 5, 1940 in Chur, Graubunden, Switzerland, the son of a pharmacist, he trained in industrial design at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich (1962–66) before turning full-time to airbrush painting in the late 1960s. His 1977 art book "Necronomicon" — its title borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft's fictional grimoire — caught the attention of the British director Ridley Scott, who hired him to design the title creature, the alien-ship, and the alien environment for "Alien" (1979). Giger's "Xenomorph" — biomechanical hybrid of skeletal vertebrate and chrome-tubed machinery, with H.R. Giger characteristic phallic and vaginal anatomical fusions — became one of the most iconic monster designs in cinema history. He shared the 1980 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects with the Alien team. He returned for "Aliens" (1986), "Alien 3" (1992), and "Prometheus" (2012). Other film work: "Poltergeist II" (1986) and "Species" (1995, designing the film's human-alien hybrid Sil). His album-cover work — for Emerson, Lake & Palmer ("Brain Salad Surgery," 1973), Debbie Harry ("KooKoo," 1981), Magma ("Attahk," 1978), Carcass, Triptykon, and others — and his "Giger Bar" interiors at Chur and Tokyo, and the H. R. Giger Museum at Chateau St. Germain, Gruyeres (opened 1998), make him one of the most-curated dark-fantasy artists of his generation. The "Atrocity Exhibition" was awarded the 2007 Premio Sentinel artistic-lifetime award; the H. R. Giger Foundation in Zurich preserves his estate.

May 13 is observed worldwide by Roman Catholics as the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, commemorating the first of the six Marian apparitions reported by the three shepherd children — Lucia dos Santos, Francisco Marto, and Jacinta Marto — at the Cova da Iria meadow near the village of Fatima, central Portugal, on May 13, 1917. (The apparitions continued on the 13th of each month from May to October 1917, except for August.) The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima is the busiest Marian pilgrimage site in the world after Lourdes, drawing 4–6 million pilgrims a year; the celebrations on the eve of and the morning of May 13 each year draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Fatima itself. The feast has particular contemporary resonance because Pope John Paul II, who survived an assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square on the same calendar date 64 years later (May 13, 1981), publicly attributed his survival to the Virgin of Fatima and made three pilgrimages to the Sanctuary (in 1982, 1991, and 2000). On May 13, 2017 — the centenary of the apparitions — Pope Francis canonised Francisco and Jacinta Marto at Fatima itself: they are the youngest non-martyr saints ever canonised by the Catholic Church.