February 15

At the Lupercalia festival in Rome, Mark Antony publicly held out a royal diadem to Julius Caesar, who declined it before the assembled crowd.

Mirza Ghalib, celebrated for his Urdu and Persian ghazals and his letters, died in Delhi.

Christmas Humphreys, the British barrister who in 1924 founded what became the London Buddhist Society, was born in London.

André Parrot, the French archaeologist whose excavations at Mari recovered a great Amorite-era palace and its cuneiform archives, was born in Désandans.

Galileo Galilei, whose telescopic observations and studies of motion helped found modern physics and observational astronomy, was born in Pisa in the Duchy of Florence.

Richard Feynman, the American physicist who reformulated quantum electrodynamics and became a celebrated teacher and explainer of science, died in Los Angeles.