March 31 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on March 31

• René Descartes (1596)

  French philosopher and mathematician known for 'I think, therefore I am' and for developing Cartesian coordinate geometry.

• Christopher Walken (1943)

  American actor and Academy Award winner for The Deer Hunter.

• Al Gore (1948)

  45th Vice President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient for his climate change advocacy.

• Ewan McGregor (1971)

  Scottish actor known for Trainspotting and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

This Day in History

• 1889 — The Eiffel Tower officially opened in Paris, having been built as the entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair and initially intended as a temporary structure.

• 1918 — The United States observed daylight saving time for the first time nationally, under the Standard Time Act passed the previous week.

• 1959 — The 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet and crossed into India, beginning a decades-long exile that continues to this day.

What March 31 Says About You

March 31 closes out the month on a note of things that were built, or begun, without any clear sense of how permanent they'd turn out to be. The Eiffel Tower, opened on this date in 1889, was designed as a temporary centerpiece for that year's World's Fair, criticized at the time by a group of prominent Parisian artists and writers who petitioned against its construction as an eyesore; its 20-year permit was extended repeatedly once its usefulness as a radio transmission tower became clear, and what was meant to be dismantled became the enduring symbol of the city instead. The Dalai Lama's flight into exile on this date in 1959 began as an urgent, uncertain escape rather than a planned permanent relocation, and more than six decades later that exile still hasn't ended, the Tibetan government-in-exile still operating from Dharamshala, India. The first nationwide observance of daylight saving time in the U.S., on this date in 1918, was framed at the time as a wartime energy-saving measure expected to be temporary; it was repealed the following year, reinstated permanently in World War II, and has been debated, on and off, as either permanent or temporary ever since — genuinely unresolved more than a century later. René Descartes, born March 31, 1596, built an entire philosophical method around doubting everything provisional until he found one thing he judged permanently certain, a fitting intellectual counterpart to a date whose real history keeps testing where the line between temporary and permanent actually falls. Aries closes out its early stretch of the calendar year with the date's characteristic decisiveness, even as the facts underneath repeatedly resist easy resolution. Three plus one closes the month's numerology cleanly at 4, the digit tied to structure and durability — a solid match for a date whose most famous structure, against its own original intentions, simply refused to come down. Al Gore, born the same day in 1948, spent decades of his post-political career trying to convince the public that a slow-moving, easy-to-dismiss problem was, in fact, permanent and urgent rather than temporary and containable. Closing out the month under Aries' usual bloodstone-or-diamond and honeysuckle pairing, this is a birthday whose real history proves that what starts out labeled temporary doesn't always stay that way. Christopher Walken, also born March 31, has spent decades taking small, seemingly minor supporting roles and turning them into some of the most quoted, most enduring performances of his films, another version of the date's theme of the ostensibly minor becoming unexpectedly permanent. Ewan McGregor, sharing this birthday, first became widely known through a role in an independent film before it was even expected to reach a wide audience, a career built on a modest beginning that outgrew its own original scale. Al Gore's advocacy work notably included a documentary built around a slideshow presentation he had delivered in person hundreds of times before it was ever adapted for film, another instance of a modest, repeated effort eventually taking on a far larger and more permanent public life.