January 1

The reformed solar calendar devised for Julius Caesar by the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes came into use, realigning the year with the sun.

Huldrych Zwingli, the priest who led the Reformation in Zurich, was born in Wildhaus in the Swiss Toggenburg valley.

The Belgian scholar Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, whose translations of the Abhidharmakośa and Bodhicāryāvatāra shaped Western Buddhist studies, was born in Liège.

Ismail al-Faruqi, the Palestinian-American philosopher of comparative religion who wrote on tawhid as a worldview, was born.

Adonis, the Syrian poet and essayist whose work reshaped modern Arabic verse, was born in the village of Qassabin.

J. Gresham Machen, the New Testament scholar who founded Westminster Theological Seminary, died in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, a Gaudiya Vaishnava teacher who founded the Gaudiya Math network of centres, died in 1937.

At Palermo Observatory, Giuseppe Piazzi recorded a slow-moving starlike point that proved to be Ceres, the first object found in the asteroid belt and today classed a dwarf planet.