May 11 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on May 11

• Salvador Dalí (1904)

  Spanish surrealist painter known for dreamlike, meticulously rendered works including The Persistence of Memory.

• Irving Berlin (1888)

  Russian-American composer behind some of the most enduring American songs ever written, including "White Christmas" and "God Bless America."

• Martha Graham (1894)

  American dancer and choreographer often called the mother of modern dance, whose technique is still taught worldwide.

• Natasha Richardson (1963)

  English actress known for stage and film roles including Cabaret and Nell, and a member of the Redgrave acting family.

This Day in History

• 1812 — British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons — the only sitting UK Prime Minister ever assassinated.

• 1858 — Minnesota was admitted to the United States as the 32nd state.

• 1981 — Reggae musician Bob Marley died in Miami at age 36 after a battle with cancer.

• 1997 — IBM's chess computer Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov, the first time a computer had beaten a reigning world champion in a full match under standard time controls.

What May 11 Says About You

Numerology assigns the 11th its own category — a master number, skipped over in the usual digit-reduction and left standing on its own, traditionally linked to heightened intuition and vision. It suits a date whose most famous births each reshaped how an entire art form got perceived: Salvador Dalí, born May 11, 1904, dragged surrealism into mainstream visibility through sheer technical precision paired with genuinely strange imagery, while Martha Graham, born a decade earlier on the same date in 1894, spent her career inventing a vocabulary for modern dance so foundational that dancers still train in what's known as Graham technique today. Both built their reputations the Taurus way — through relentless, obsessive discipline rather than raw spontaneity, however wild the finished work looked. Irving Berlin, also born May 11, wrote thousands of songs across seven decades without ever learning to read or write music in the conventional sense, dictating melodies to a musical secretary his entire career — a workaround that never stopped him from becoming one of the most commercially successful songwriters in American history. Bob Marley's death on this date in 1981, at just 36, cut short a career that had already turned reggae into a genuinely global genre, and the date's connection to sudden artistic loss doesn't stop there: Deep Blue's 1997 defeat of Garry Kasparov, sixteen years later almost to the day, marked its own kind of ending — the first time a machine had unambiguously out-thought the best human player alive at his own game, a shift in what intelligence itself meant in public conversation that's still being worked out decades later. Spencer Perceval's assassination in 1812 remains, more than two centuries later, the only time a sitting British Prime Minister has been killed in office, a genuinely singular historical footnote for a date that otherwise trends toward artistic reinvention. Natasha Richardson, born May 11, 1963, carried a multigenerational acting legacy forward with the same quiet consistency that defines this date's Taurus disposition. Set that master-number 11 against the fixed, unremarkable facts of the month — emerald, lily of the valley — and May 11 still comes out sharper-edged than the days around it, tilted toward vision and reinvention rather than routine. Dalí's precise, almost photographic technique was itself a deliberate rejection of the looser brushwork common among his surrealist peers, proof that reinventing what a painting could depict didn't require reinventing how it was physically made. Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov was itself a rematch: the machine had lost their first encounter the previous year, meaning its eventual win came only after its own engineers spent twelve months refining it in direct response to that earlier defeat. Irving Berlin's inability to read written music meant he composed almost entirely at the piano, often in a single key he'd had custom-fitted with a transposing lever, a workaround built directly around his own limitation rather than an attempt to overcome it conventionally.