List of Famous people born on October 17th

Virgil Hamlin Goode Jr. is an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 5th congressional district of Virginia between 1997 and 2009. He was initially a Democrat, but became an independent in 2000 and switched to the Republican Party in 2002. He was narrowly defeated in 2008 by Democrat Tom Perriello.

Abram Fedorovich Ioffe was a prominent Russian/Soviet physicist. He received the Stalin Prize (1942), the Lenin Prize (1960) (posthumously), and the Hero of Socialist Labor (1955). Ioffe was an expert in various areas of solid state physics and electromagnetism. He established research laboratories for radioactivity, superconductivity, and nuclear physics, many of which became independent institutes.

Alexander Sutherland Neill was a Scottish educator and author known for his school, Summerhill, and its philosophy of freedom from adult coercion and community self-governance. Raised in Scotland, Neill taught at several schools before attending the University of Edinburgh in 1908–1912. He took two jobs in journalism before World War I, and taught at Gretna Green Village School in the first year of the war, writing his first book, A Dominie's Log (1915), as a diary of his life there as head teacher. He joined a Dresden school in 1921 and founded Summerhill on returning to England in 1924. Summerhill gained renown in the 1930s and then in the 1960s–1970s, due to progressive and counter-culture interest. Neill wrote 20 books. His top seller was the 1960 Summerhill, read widely in the free school movement from the 1960s.

Helmut Kasimier was a German politician, representative of the Social Democratic Party. Kasimier was a Member of Parliament of Lower Saxony from 1963 to 1986, during which he was the Chairman of the SDP faction in the parliament from 1967 to 1974 and Finance Minister of Lower Saxony from 1974 to 1976.