List of Famous people born on August 17th

Heiner Goebbels is a German composer, director and professor at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen and artistic director of the International Festival of the Arts Ruhrtriennale 2012–14. His composition Stifters Dinge (2007) received five votes in a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, and writers for The Guardian ranked his composition Hashirigaki (2000) the ninth greatest classical composition of the same period.

Charles Latour Rogier was a Belgian liberal statesman and a leader in the Belgian Revolution of 1830. He became Prime Minister of Belgium on two occasions: from 1847 to 1852, and again from 1857 to 1868.

Li Jianwu was a Chinese author, dramatist and translator who was the president of French Literature Research Council. Li was an officer of the Chinese State Council and a member of National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He translated the works of the French novelists Gustave Flaubert and Stendhal into Chinese.

Roberto Clemente Jr. -- or in the Spanish naming system Roberto Clemente Zabala —is a baseball broadcaster and former professional baseball player from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was born in the Santurce barrio. His father Roberto Clemente was the first Latin American player to compile 3,000 hits in Major League Baseball history. His mother Vera Clemente hosted a telethon in Puerto Rico in order to raise funds for the Ciudad Roberto Clemente, a sporting complex located in Carolina, Puerto Rico.

Peter Benoit was a Flemish composer of Belgian nationality.

Kunioki Mima is a Japanese plasma physicist. He is known for his contributions to the theory of turbulent transport in plasmas, and in particular the derivation of the Hasegawa–Mima equation in 1977, which won him the 2011 Hannes Alfvén Prize.