May 15 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on May 15

• L. Frank Baum (1856)

  American author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which became one of the best-known works of American children's literature.

• Pierre Curie (1859)

  French physicist who, with wife Marie Curie, pioneered research into radioactivity and shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.

• Jasper Johns (1930)

  American artist known for paintings of flags and targets that became touchstones of postwar American art.

• Madeleine Albright (1937)

  Czech-American diplomat who became the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.

This Day in History

• 1911 — The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the breakup of Standard Oil, ruling it an illegal monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

• 1918 — The United States Post Office launched the first regularly scheduled airmail service, flying between Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia.

• 1940 — Nylon stockings went on public sale in the United States for the first time, selling out within hours in many stores.

• 1948 — Armies from neighboring Arab states invaded the newly declared state of Israel, beginning the first Arab-Israeli War.

What May 15 Says About You

May 15 sits one day after the founding moments of May 14, and its own history reads like a set of consequences and follow-throughs. The Arab-Israeli War that began on this date in 1948, the day after Israeli statehood was declared, is the clearest example — a direct continuation of the previous day's events rather than something separate. Pierre Curie, born May 15, 1859, spent his career in a genuine scientific partnership with his wife Marie, their joint research into radioactivity eventually costing him his life through the very radiation exposure that won them a Nobel Prize — a stark reminder that discovery has never been free of risk. L. Frank Baum, born on the same date in 1856, wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz almost by accident, reportedly inventing the name Oz on the spot from a filing cabinet label, and had no idea it would become one of the most enduring works of American children's fiction. The Supreme Court's 1911 breakup of Standard Oil, delivered on this date, marked one of the earliest and most consequential applications of American antitrust law, a ruling still cited in monopoly cases more than a century later. As a Taurus date, May 15 carries an appropriately material undercurrent: nylon stockings hit store shelves for the first time on this exact day in 1940, selling out within hours across the country, evidence that even a Taurus-associated fondness for comfort and material goods has real historical footprint. The numerology day number for the 15th reduces to 6, traditionally tied to responsibility and care for others — genuinely apt for Madeleine Albright, born May 15, 1937, who became the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State and spent much of her career on issues of humanitarian consequence. Jasper Johns, born on this date in 1930, took the most familiar, almost domestic American symbols — flags, targets, numbers — and rendered them strange through sheer painstaking technique, another instance of the date's habit of finding something unexpected inside the ordinary. May 15's real character is one of consequences playing out — legal, military, scientific, and commercial — from decisions made just before it, a birthday less about its own emerald-and-lily-of-the-valley symbolism than about what the day right before it set in motion. Marie Curie herself continued the couple's shared research for decades after Pierre's 1906 death, eventually becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a direct continuation of the very partnership this date's birth record commemorates. Baum's own path to writing Oz was itself a consequence of an earlier career: he had already tried and failed at several other jobs, including running a store and a newspaper, before turning to children's fiction relatively late. Madeleine Albright's own path to the State Department followed a similarly indirect route, beginning as a refugee from Czechoslovakia as a child before decades of academic and diplomatic work eventually placed her at the center of American foreign policy.