List of Famous people born on January 1st

Kellee Santiago is a Venezuelan American video game designer and producer. She is the co-founder and former president of thatgamecompany. Santiago was born in Caracas, Venezuela and was raised in Richmond, Virginia, where she played video games from a young age and was encouraged by her software engineer father to experiment with computers. While attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she became active in experimental theater, and intended to pursue it after earning a master's degree in the Interactive Media Program of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. While there, however, she became involved in video game design, and produced Cloud, a game developed by Jenova Chen and a student team. Its success sparked her and Chen to found thatgamecompany upon graduating, and she became the president.

Nicholas John Pippenger is a researcher in computer science. He has produced a number of fundamental results many of which are being widely used in the field of theoretical computer science, database processing and compiler optimization. He has also achieved the rank of IBM Fellow at Almaden IBM Research Center in San Jose, California. He has taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and at Princeton University in the US. In the Fall of 2006 Pippenger joined the faculty of Harvey Mudd College.

Christoph Meinel is a German scientist and university professor of computer sciences. He is president and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) for Digital Engineering, dean of the Digital Engineering Faculty of the University of Potsdam (Germany), and professor for Internet Technologies and Systems.

Rudi Studer is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at KIT, Germany. He was the head of the knowledge management research group at the Institute AIFB and one of the directors of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI). He is a former president of the Semantic Web Science Association, an STI International Fellow, and a member of numerous programme committees and editorial boards. He was one of the inaugural editor-in-chiefs of the Journal of Web Semantics, a position he held until 2007. He is a co-author of the "Semantic Wikipedia" proposal which lead to the development of Wikidata.

David G. Lowe is a Canadian computer scientist working for Google as a Senior Research Scientist. He was a former professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia and New York University.

Cynthia Ní Mhurchú is an Irish barrister from Carlow and previously a broadcaster with Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). She presented Eurovision Song Contest 1994 in Dublin along with Gerry Ryan.

Jean-Claude Vannier is a French musician, composer and arranger. Vannier has composed music, written lyrics, and produced albums for many singers.

The works of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, have become extremely popular, and have exerted considerable influence since their publication. A culture of fandom sprang up in the 1960s, leading to many popular votes in favour of the books, but acceptance by the establishment of literary criticism has been slower. Nevertheless, academic studies on Tolkien's works have been appearing at an increasing pace since the mid-1980s, prompting a thorough literary re-evaluation of his work.