December 30, 1950

1950Timothy Mo, Chinese-English author^[†]

Timothy Peter Mo is a British Asian novelist. Born to a British mother and a Hong Kong father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until the age of 10, when he moved to Britain. Educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxford, Mo worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist.

1950Lewis Shiner, American journalist and author^[†]

Lewis Shiner is an American writer.

1950Bjarne Stroustrup, Danish computer scientist, created the C++ programming language^[†]

Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist, known for the development of the C++ programming language. He led the Large-scale Programming Research department at Bell Labs, served as a professor of computer science at Texas A&M University, and spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley while also being a visiting professor at Columbia University. Since 2022 he has been a full professor at Columbia.

1950Martti Vainio, Finnish runner^[†]

Martti Olavi Vainio is a Finnish former long-distance runner. In Finland he is recognized as the last of the great runners of the famous "V-line", the previous ones being Juha Väätäinen, Lasse Virén, and Pekka Vasala. Each of them won at least one gold medal either at the Summer Olympics or the European Athletics Championships in the 1970s. Vainio's accomplishments are tarnished though, for testing positive for PEDs on at least two occasions. One of those events was the 1984 Olympic Games where he was disqualified and stripped of his medal and later suspended from sport.