On this day

August 5, 1934

Revisit the news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.

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Notable Births

1934Karl Johan Åström, Swedish engineer and theorist[†]

Karl Johan Åström is a Swedish control theorist, who has made contributions to the fields of control theory and control engineering, computer control and adaptive control. In 1965, he described a general framework of Markov decision processes with incomplete information, what ultimately led to the notion of a Partially observable Markov decision process.

Wendell Berry

1934Wendell Berry, American novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist[†]

Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000), and That Distant Land (2004).

Gay Byrne

1934Gay Byrne, Irish radio and television host (died 2019)[†]

Gabriel Mary Byrne was an Irish presenter and host of radio and television. His most notable role was as the first host of The Late Late Show over a 37-year period spanning 1962 until 1999. The Late Late Show is the world's longest-running live chat show. He was affectionately known as "Uncle Gay", "Gaybo" or "Uncle Gaybo". His time working in Britain with Granada Television saw him become the first person to introduce the Beatles on-screen, and Byrne was later the first to introduce Boyzone on-screen in 1993. According to Byrne, Paul McCartney asked him to be the Beatles' agent during a sound check for his show but he declined the offer.