December 5

Gershom Scholem, who founded the modern academic study of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, was born in Berlin.

Sri Aurobindo, the Bengali philosopher and yogi whose Integral Yoga sought a spiritual evolution of consciousness, died at Pondicherry.

Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum mechanics whose 1927 uncertainty principle reshaped physics, was born in Wurzburg, Germany.