List of Famous people born on January 1st

Joanna Rajkowska is a Polish contemporary artist who came onto the Polish art scene in the 1990s. Her most famous work is called "Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue", a 15-meter-tall (50-foot) artificial palm tree installed on Warsaw's Jerusalem Avenue.

Víctor Hugo Ayala Núñez is a Paraguayan footballer who plays as a midfielder for Gimnasia La Plata in Argentina. He is renowned for his long shot capabilities.

María Elvira Roca Barea is a Spanish academic and writer. She studied philology, and specialized in the literature of the middle ages and early modern Europe. Her research work has primarily focused on narrative strategies in different literary periods, but she became famous for her late work on the Spanish Black Legend.

Ana Álvarez Wagener is a Spanish actress. She has appeared in such films as The Sleeping Voice, My Prison Yard, Biutiful, and The Invisible Guest. Her television credits include the role of Vicenta Ramírez in La Señora and its successor 14 de abril. La República.

Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras is a Spanish paleoanthropologist and author known for his work in the Atapuerca Archaeological Site.

Abraham "Avi" Loeb is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He had been the longest serving Chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011–2020), Founding Director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The Schön scandal concerns German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs with semiconductors that were later discovered to be fraudulent. Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001, as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, all of which were later rescinded.

General Chen Pao-yu is a Taiwan army appointed as the Chief of the Army Staff Taiwan since April 2019 and deputy chief of the General Staff of the Taiwan Armed Forces. Prior to his appointment, he was deputy chief of other army staff in April 2017 to 2019.

Asiem El Difraoui is a political scientist, economist, and documentary director and producer of Egyptian-German descent. He focuses primarily on topics related to the Arab world, and is widely considered as a leading expert on Arab media in general and jihadism internet propaganda in particular.

Shōko Ieda is a Japanese writer of non-fiction. She is known for titillating novels replete with interracial sex scenes, and has aroused a great deal of controversy in Japan; her works have been accused of "demonising female sexuality". She rose to public prominence through her 1986 book Gang Wives, about the girlfriends and spouses of yakuza. She spent nearly a year getting to know her subjects, and had also been shot at during the course of writing the book. It was later adapted as a television series by Tōei starring Shima Iwashita, and as a series of Gokudo no Onna-tachi movies starring Reiko Takashima. Her books continued to receive a good popular reception and be made into movies; her 1990 Hug Me, Kiss Me was awarded the 22nd Ohya Non-fiction Prize in 1991. Hug Me, Kiss Me was an account of her time volunteering in organization offering assistance to AIDS patients while living in Savannah, Georgia in 1987, along with an epilogue about the risk AIDS posed to Japanese tourists in Hawaii; its cinematic adaptation was the first film in Japan to openly address AIDS. However, her descriptions of the African American community were accused of making AIDS seem "alien" and "distant" to her Japanese target audience.