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In the spring of 2022, we saw the re-emergence on social media of a popular piece of historical coincidence connecting three of the most prominent figures in the history of science and knowledge. According to the claim, the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died on March 14, which is the birthday of the German physicist Albert Einstein, and Hawking was also born on Jan. 8, which is the anniversary of the death of the 17th century Florentine physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Both those assertions are accurate, and our rating is True. A popular version of the meme read: Observations about these overlapping dates started on the very day Hawking died, March 14, 2018, and have been popular on social media ever since, with interesting variations such as the claim that Hawking and Einstein were both aged 76 at the time of their deaths, and that Hawking was born not only on the same date Galileo died, but on the 300th anniversary of his death. As we will demonstrate, those supplementary claims are also true. Hawking did indeed die in the early hours of March 14, 2018, at his home in Cambridge, England. His death, at the age of 76, was announced by his children, who wrote jointly: March 14 was also the birthday of Einstein, who was born on that date in 1879, in the southern German city of Ulm, to parents Hermann and Pauline Einstein. In 2016, the official social media profiles of Einstein's estate posted a copy of his original handwritten birth certificate, along with the following translation: When Einstein died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey, he was 76 years old, the same age as Hawking when he died six decades later. According to the official website of his estate, Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942, to parents Frank and Eileen Isobel Hawking. The website itself notes the Galileo anniversary, stating: While the other key dates from this meme are relatively easy to verify using official and reliable sources, the date of Galileo's death is trickier, both because of the sheer distance in time from primary or firsthand accounts of his demise, but also due to an intriguing historical wrinkle in the form of the Florentine calendar (or Stylus Florentinus in Latin), which prevailed in medieval Florence. The Galileo scholar Thomas Settle outlined the problem: Notwithstanding those concerns, Galileo's death does indeed appear to have taken place on Jan. 8, 1642, as a modern reader would understand it, using the Gregorian calendar, and therefore exactly 300 years before Hawking was born in Oxford. Here's why. In 1654, Galileo's young assistant and collaborator, the mathematician Vincenzo Viviani, published a biography of his mentor, in which he described the circumstances of his death as follows: In a footnote, the Italian Galileo scholar Stefano Gattei explained that Viviani was using the Florentine style in describing the date of Galileo's death as Jan. 8, 1641, meaning it was Jan. 8, 1642 in modern terms. However, the truly decisive piece of evidence here comes in the context of a later work by Viviani, his 1702 Grati animi monumenta (Testimony of a Grateful Soul.) In the original Latin, Viviani described Galileo's death as having occurred: Which means: In his own original Latin footnote, Viviani distinguished between Christi Incarnatione (Christ's incarnation) and Christo nato (Christ's birth) — effectively two variations of what has traditionally been referred to as A.D. (Anno domini). Crucially, he writes Christi Incar. MDCXLI and Christo nato MDCXLII — In the year of Christ's incarnation 1641 and In the year of Christ's birth 1642. By stipulating hora quarta n.s. Viviani was also noting that the time of Galileo's death was in the fourth hour [novum stylum] or new style — that is, 4 a.m. on what a modern reader would know as Jan. 8. Hence, Galileo's death took place at 4 a.m. on Jan. 8, 1642. Using the modern Gregorian calendar, that's 300 years to the day before Hawking's birth.
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