December 26, 1940

1940Edward C. Prescott, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (died 2022)^[†]

Edward Christian Prescott was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. Prescott died of cancer on November 6, 2022, at the age of 81.

1940Ray Sadecki, American baseball player (died 2014)^[†]

Raymond Michael Sadecki was an American Major League Baseball pitcher. He is best remembered as the left-handed complement to Bob Gibson, who in 1964, won 20 games to lead the St. Louis Cardinals to their first World Series title in eighteen years. He was notable for throwing the palmball.