Everybody’s heard of superintendents. Among other things, they manage apartment buildings, at least in the US. But how about just plain intendants? They’re not underlings to the superintendents; they were government officials in the French, Portuguese, and Spanish monarchies, and Jean Talon was one of them. He was born January 8, 1626, and became the first intendant of New France, which is now part of Canada. He also started the whole beer industry in North America when he established La Brasserie du Roy in Quebec City in 1668.
Fanny Bullock Workman probably didn’t drink much beer; she was an American mountaineer born January 8, 1859. She traveled the world with her husband, William Workman, and together they explored the Swiss Alps and the Himalayas. She set a lot list of records for the altitudes reached by women (she was one of the very first women in the western world to even try climbing mountains) and she wrote extensively about her adventures in climbing and touring on bicycles (which were also pretty new at the time). She also gave lectures about her travels, and advocated for women to do more than just live as housewives. The only stain on her record is that as a privileged White woman born into wealth and married to even more wealth, she evidently badly treated all the poorer people who lived in the places she was “discovering.”
That’s certainly something that Fearless Nadia wouldn’t do. She was born Mary Ann Evans on January 8, 1908 in Perth, Australia. Her family moved to Peshawar in 1915, and she studied ballet dancing under “Madam Astrova,” whose troupe of dancers entertained British soldiers at military bases in India. That was where she learned gymnastics, and also where she met an American fortune teller who told her she would have a successful career, but only if she took a stage name starting with the letter “N.” So she became “Nadia” because she liked how it sounded. In 1930 she joined the Zarko Circus, and one way or another met Jamshed Wadia, the founder of a Bombay movie studio. She talked her way into a screen test, and turned out to be very popular — she specialized in doing her own stunts, and in the early 1930s was billed as “Fearless Nadia” in movies. She kept making movies at least through the 1960s, and in 2015 the Indian government issued a postage stamp to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth. And come on, you can’t fail to include someone named “Fearless Nadia” in a list of notable birthdays!
Another January 8 notable is Richard Courant. He was a mathematician born January 8, 1888, and emigrated to the US in 1936. He authored math textbooks that are still in use, as well as a best seller: What is Mathematics? As a leading mathematician in the US, he was involved in some military programs including the Manhattan Project — and in the 1950s was invited to witness a test launch of the Orion. That was a bizarre idea that if you made a huge steel plate with a hole in the middle, put a crew cabin on top of it, and dropped atomic bombs through the hole, you could ride the nuclear explosions up into orbit. I’m not kidding; they really tried this, although just with regular bombs. It even partially worked, although exploding nukes in the atmosphere was banned shortly afterward. But Courant is in today’s list because of his famous remark, in a heavy German accent, when he saw the test: “Zis is not nuts; zis is supernuts.”
