Famous Birthdays on January 13

Salmon Portland Chase was an American politician and jurist who served as the sixth chief justice of the United States from 1864 to his death in 1873. Earlier, he had served as the 25th United States Secretary of the Treasury in the Abraham Lincoln administration from 1861 to 1864, during the American Civil War. Chase also served as the 23rd Governor of Ohio from 1856 to 1860, and represented Ohio in the United States Senate from 1849 to 1855 and again in 1861. Chase is therefore one of the few American politicians who have held constitutional office in all three branches of the federal government, in addition to serving in the highest state-level office. From the 1850s onward, even as Chief Justice, Chase unsuccessfully sought a presidential nomination.

Stephen Gordon Hendry is a Scottish retired professional snooker player and a current commentator and pundit. One of the most successful players in snooker history, he turned professional in 1985, aged 16, and rose rapidly through the snooker world rankings, reaching number four in the world by the end of his third professional season. He won his first World Snooker Championship in 1990 at the age of 21 years and 106 days, becoming the sport's youngest world champion, a record he still holds. He won seven world titles between 1990 and 1999, setting a new modern-era record that stood outright until Ronnie O'Sullivan equalled it in 2022. He also won the Masters six times and the UK Championship five times for a career total of 18 Triple Crown tournament wins, a total exceeded only by O'Sullivan's 23. His total of 36 ranking titles is second only to O'Sullivan's 41, while his nine seasons as world number one were the most by any player under the annual ranking system used until 2010.

Paul Maurice Kelly is an Australian rock music singer-songwriter and guitarist. He has performed solo, and has led numerous groups, including the Dots, the Coloured Girls, and the Messengers. He has worked with other artists and groups, including associated projects Professor Ratbaggy and Stardust Five. Kelly's music style has ranged from bluegrass to studio-oriented dub reggae, but his core output straddles folk, rock and country. His lyrics capture the vastness of the culture and landscape of Australia by chronicling life about him for almost 50 years. David Fricke from Rolling Stone calls Kelly "one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard, Australian or otherwise". Kelly has said, "Song writing is mysterious to me. I still feel like a total beginner. I don't feel like I have got it nailed yet."

Clark Ashton Smith was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories and poetry, and an artist. He achieved early recognition in California for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures". Other writers influenced by Smith include Leigh Brackett, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, George R. R. Martin, and Donald Sidney-Fryer.

Kamran Akmal is a Pakistani cricket administrator, coach and former cricketer, who played for Pakistan as a right-handed batsman & wicketkeeper. He started his international career in November 2002 with a Test match at Harare Sports Club. Akmal was a member of the Pakistan team that won the 2009 ICC World Twenty20. He was an integral member of the Peshawar Zalmi for the entire duration of his career in the Pakistan Super League having played for them from the inaugural season of the PSL 2016, till his last in PSL 2022. He scored three hundreds and was a key figure in their success in winning PSL 2017 and being runners up in PSL 2018, 2019 and 2021, being the top run scorer of the team for a large portion of those seasons.

Rune Eriksen, also known by his stage name Blasphemer, is a Norwegian musician best known as the former guitarist and songwriter of black metal band Mayhem. He took his stage name from a Sodom song and joined Mayhem in October 1994, before departing the band in late 2008. Eriksen founded his solo project RUÏM in 2020 and is currently a member of Aura Noir, Earth Electric, and the multinational bands Twilight Of The Gods and Vltimas, the former initially being a Bathory tribute band and the latter being a supergroup with former Morbid Angel vocalist David Vincent and drummer Flo Mounier of Cryptopsy. Eriksen and Mounier has previously been a part of death metal artist Nader Sadek's band along with Steve Tucker of Morbid Angel. Eriksen has also been a live member of Gaahls Wyrd and made guest appearances on recordings by Absu, Negură Bunget and Root. His former bands and projects include Mezzerschmitt and the Portuguese gothic doom band Ava Inferi. Eriksen has resided in Portugal since 2004.

Guillermo Sebastián Coria, nicknamed El Mago, is an Argentine former professional tennis player. He was ranked as high as world No. 3 in men's singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), achieved in May 2004. Coria achieved his best results on clay, where he won eight of his nine ATP Tour singles titles, and during his prime years in 2003 and 2004 was considered "the world's best clay-court player." He reached the final of the 2004 French Open, losing to Gastón Gaudio despite serving for the match twice and being up two-sets-to-love. In later years, injuries and a lack of confidence affected his game, and he retired in 2009 at the age of 27. Between 2001 and 2002, he served a seven-month suspension for taking the banned substance nandrolone.

Thomas Joseph Gola was an American basketball player and politician. Gola was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1976 and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006. He is widely considered one of the greatest NCAA basketball players of all time, playing four years with the La Salle Explorers. Gola was a consensus first-team All-American for three consecutive years. He has held the record for the most total rebounds in NCAA history since 1955, and was the first college player to have over 2,000 points and 2,000 rebounds in a career. Gola was the Helms Foundations College Basketball Player of the Year in 1954, and the United Press Player of the Year in 1955, as well as being the highest vote recipient for the Associated Press' 1955 All-America Team. He was selected the most valuable player in the 1952 National Invitation Tournament and the 1954 NCAA basketball tournament.

Eero Koivistoinen is a Finnish jazz musician and saxophone player, who started his career in the mid-1960s. Koivistoinen has worked as a musician, composer, arranger, conductor, producer and educator. He was born in Helsinki and first heard jazz from the records his sailor brother had brought in from his travels. As a youngster Koivistoinen studied classical violin, saxophone and also composition at the Sibelius Academy, and later jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston. His first line-up featured the drummer Edward Vesala and bassist Pekka Sarmanto. Koivistoinen was also a member of the seminal Finnish rock band Blues Section in the years 1967 and 1968. In 1968 he released his first solo album, a "literary record" called Valtakunta which featured songs composed to the texts of such poets as Pentti Saarikoski, Jarkko Laine, Tuomas Anhava and Hannu Mäkelä; interpreted by the vocalists Vesa-Matti Loiri, Eero Raittinen and Seija Simola. Eero Koivistoinen's later solo albums such as Wahoo (1972) enjoy a considerable international reputation. His hip hop-influenced 2006 album X-Ray features such people as the vocalists Charles Salter and Bina Nkwazi, DJ LBJ and the rap artist Redrama.

Ernestine Louise Rose was a suffragist, abolitionist, and freethinker who has been called the "first Jewish feminist." Her career spanned from the 1830s to the 1870s, making her a contemporary to the more famous suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Largely forgotten in contemporary discussions of the American women's rights movement, she was one of its major intellectual forces in nineteenth-century America. The quote, "women's rights are human rights," was believed to be coined by her. Her relationship with Judaism is a debated motivation for her advocacy. As a rabbi's daughter, Ernestine had received more education than other women her age. Although less well remembered than her fellow suffragists and abolitionists, in 1996, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and in 1998 the Ernestine Rose Society was founded to "revive the legacy of this important early nineteenth century reformer by recognizing her pioneering role in the first wave of feminism."

Arthur Howey Ross was a Canadian professional ice hockey player and executive from 1905 until 1954. Regarded as one of the best defenders of his era by his peers, he was one of the first to skate with the puck up the ice rather than pass it to a forward. He was on Stanley Cup championship teams twice in a playing career that lasted thirteen seasons; in January 1907 with the Kenora Thistles and 1908 with the Montreal Wanderers. Like other players of the time, Ross played for several different teams and leagues, and is noted for his time with the Wanderers while they were members of the National Hockey Association (NHA) and its successor, the National Hockey League (NHL). In 1911, he led one of the first organized player strikes over increased pay. When the Wanderers' home arena burned down in January 1918, the team ceased operations and Ross retired as a player.

Penelope Ann Miller, sometimes credited as Penelope Miller, is an American actress. She began her career on Broadway in the original run of Biloxi Blues (1985–1986), later appearing in the 1988 film adaptation of the same name. After playing small roles in the comedies Adventures in Babysitting (1987) and Big Top Pee-wee (1988), and receiving a Tony Award nomination for her leading role in the Broadway revival of Our Town (1988–1989), Miller came to prominence with a succession of major parts in films such as The Freshman, Awakenings, Kindergarten Cop, Other People's Money (1991), Chaplin (1992), The Shadow (1994), and The Relic (1997). For her portrayal of exotic dancer Gail in Carlito's Way (1993), she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Marco Pantani was an Italian road racing cyclist, widely regarded as one of the greatest climbing specialists in the history of the sport by measures of his legacy, credits from other riders, and records. He recorded the fastest climbs up the Tour's iconic venues of Mont Ventoux (46:00) and Alpe d'Huez (36:50), and other cyclists including Lance Armstrong and Charly Gaul have hailed Pantani's climbing skills. He is the second to last rider and one of only eight to ever win the Tour de France – Giro d'Italia double, doing so in 1998. He is the sixth of seven Italians, after Ottavio Bottecchia, Gino Bartali, Fausto Coppi, Gastone Nencini and Felice Gimondi, and before Vincenzo Nibali to win the Tour de France.

Ronny Turiaf is a French former professional basketball player who played 10 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Turiaf grew up in France and played college basketball for the Gonzaga Bulldogs in the United States, where he led the West Coast Conference (WCC) in scoring in his senior year. After graduating from Gonzaga, he entered the 2005 NBA draft and was picked by the Los Angeles Lakers. He later played for the Golden State Warriors, New York Knicks, Washington Wizards, Miami Heat, Los Angeles Clippers and Minnesota Timberwolves. Turiaf won an NBA championship with Miami in 2012. He was also a member of the French national team. He was inducted into the French Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020.

Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in philosophy of science. He started his academic career as lecturer in philosophy of science at the University of Bristol (1955–1958); afterward, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades (1958–1989). At various points in his life, he held joint appointments at the University College London (1967–1970), the London School of Economics (1967), the FU Berlin (1968), Yale University (1969), the University of Auckland, the University of Sussex (1974), and the ETH Zurich (1980–1990). He gave lectures and lecture series at the University of Minnesota (1958–1962), Stanford University (1967), the University of Kassel (1977), and the University of Trento (1992).

Michael Peña is an American actor. He has starred in many films, including Crash (2004), World Trade Center (2006), Shooter (2007), Observe and Report (2009), Tower Heist (2011), Battle: Los Angeles (2011), End of Watch (2012), and Gangster Squad (2013). He has also acted in films such as American Hustle (2013), The Martian (2015), Ant-Man (2015) and its sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), and Extinction (2018). Peña had the title role in Cesar Chavez (2014), played DEA agent Kiki Camarena in season one of the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico (2018), and CIA agent Domingo Chavez in season 4 of the Prime Video series Jack Ryan (2023). He also starred in A Million Miles Away (2023).

Gertrude Mary Cox was an American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later appointed director of both the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina and the Statistics Research Division of North Carolina State University. Her most important and influential research dealt with experimental design; In 1950 she published the book Experimental Designs, on the subject with W. G. Cochran, which became the major reference work on the design of experiments for statisticians for years afterwards. In 1949 Cox became the first woman elected into the International Statistical Institute and in 1956 was President of the American Statistical Association.

Robert Stack was an American actor and television host. Known for his deep voice and commanding presence, he appeared in over 40 feature films. He starred in the ABC television series The Untouchables (1959–1963), for which he won the 1960 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Series, and later hosted/narrated the true-crime series Unsolved Mysteries (1987–2002). He was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film Written on the Wind (1956). Later in his career, Stack was known for his deadpan comedy roles that lampooned his dramatic on-screen persona, most notably as Captain Rex Kramer in Airplane! (1980).

Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and essayist. A pioneering figure in LGBTQ and especially gay literature after the Stonewall riots, he wrote with rare candor about gay identity, relationships, and sex. His work emerged as part of an increasingly solidified and visible LGBTQ community, helping to reshape public narratives at a time when coming out was still a dangerous, even radical act. His writing, noted for intimate depth and literary elegance, includes the semi-autobiographical trilogy A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997). He also co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), promoting sex-positive discourse.