March 1

Georg Ebers, the German scholar whose name marks one of ancient Egypt's great medical papyri, was born in Berlin.

Dainin Katagiri, the Soto Zen priest who founded the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center and helped establish Zen practice in the American Midwest, died on this day in 1990.

Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the known chemical elements by atomic weight into a periodic system, drafting the table that exposed recurring patterns and even predicted elements not yet discovered.

In Paris, physicist Henri Becquerel developed photographic plates that had lain in a drawer with uranium salts and found them darkened, revealing a spontaneous radiation later named radioactivity.