A roundup of the most notable celebrity birthdays happening this month — and a look at how today's stars like to celebrate their special day.
March is a month of notable birthdays that spans an unusual range of human achievement, from scientists who changed how we understand the universe to entertainers who defined generations of popular culture. The month contains the birthday of Albert Einstein, born March 14, 1879, whose special and general theories of relativity restructured physics so completely that every GPS navigation system on Earth depends on corrections his equations predicted. It also contains the birthday of Lady Gaga, born March 28, 1986, whose reinvention of pop music spectacle over the past two decades has influenced every major stadium performer who followed her. The range alone suggests March is worth paying attention to.
Mikhail Gorbachev, born March 2, 1931, spent his birthday each year from 1985 onward navigating the slow dissolution of the Soviet Union he was attempting to reform rather than dismantle. His birthday in 1991, celebrated just months before the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist in December of that year, must rank among the more historically laden personal milestones of the twentieth century. Andrew Jackson, the seventh US President, was born on March 15, 1767, sharing a birth date with Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, a coincidence that Jackson's admirers considered meaningful and his critics considered apt.
Statistical analysis of the birth dates of individuals who appear on celebrity lists consistently shows that certain months produce higher than expected numbers of famous people in certain fields. Actors and performers show a slight overrepresentation of summer birth months, which researchers connect to the relative age effect in school drama and music programmes where summer-born children are older than their classmates and receive more attention and encouragement from teachers. Scientists and academics show a different pattern, with winter births slightly overrepresented, possibly for reasons connected to prenatal vitamin D exposure and seasonal variation in developmental conditions during the third trimester.
Looking at the famous people who share your birthday is one of the most popular features on PopularBirthdays.com, and it reveals something that pure biography cannot: the extraordinary randomness of greatness. The same date that produced a revolutionary physicist also produced a pop star, a political leader and a sporting champion, each of whom arrived in the world on the same morning, breathed the same late autumn air and shared no characteristic beyond their birth date. If the date itself carried any determining power, it would have to be a remarkably versatile one. The more likely explanation is that the date tells us nothing about destiny, and everything about the fact that remarkable people are born on every day of the year.
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