Born on February 23

Nichiren (1222-1282) was a 13th-century Japanese Buddhist monk, founder of the Nichiren-shū school. He taught that the Lotus Sūtra contained the ultimate essence of the Buddha's teaching and advocated reciting the mantra “Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō.”

A French divisional general of the First Empire, Claude-Juste-Alexandre Legrand distinguished himself during the Napoleonic Wars, most notably at Austerlitz. He commanded several army corps under Napoleon Bonaparte.

Carl Menger (1840-1921) was an Austrian economist and the founder of the Austrian School of economics. With his theory of marginal utility, he took part in the “marginalist revolution” that transformed economic thought in the 19th century.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, he was a leading theorist in the fight against racial segregation and a co-founder of the NAACP in 1909.

Russian and later Soviet painter and theorist, founder of Suprematism, a major movement in abstract art. His painting *Black Square* (1915) is one of the most radical works of modern art.

Claude Sautet (1924-2000) was a French director and screenwriter, a major figure of the auteur cinema of the 1970s-1990s. He is famous for his intimate portraits of the bourgeoisie and his chronicles of human feelings, as in *The Things of Life* and *A Heart in Winter*.