14th December: Nostradamus

Nostradamus was born either on this date or the 21st, depending on which source you consult, in 1503.

1. He was one of at least nine children and his real name was Michel de Nostredame.
2. Although most famous for his prophecies, he was an apothecary by trade and invented a "rose pill" which was claimed to be a protection from the plague.
3. After a few years working as an apothecary, he decided to study medicine and entered the University of Montpellier. However, the university had a poor opinion of apothecaries - they viewed it as a manual trade, and had a rule that none of their students should have been engaged in such lowly employment. So they threw him out. Nevertheless, as well as his prophecies, he wrote two books about medical science.
4. He dabbled in crowd funding, too - between 1556 and 1567 he and his wife acquired a one-thirteenth share in a huge canal project organised by Adam de Craponne to irrigate largely waterless Salon-de-Provence and the nearby Désert de la Crau from the river Durance.
5. His fame as a prophet began when he wrote an almanac for 1550. It was a great success, so he wrote one every year. His almanacs contained at least 6,338 prophecies.
6. Thanks to the almanacs, the nobility of the day started coming to him for horoscopes and psychic readings. Though unlike most astrologers, he expected his clients to compile their birth charts themselves, because when Nostradamus did the charts, he'd often make schoolboy errors like forgetting to make adjustments for the client's time or place of birth!
7. Some accounts of his life say that he was afraid of being persecuted as a heretic, but in his day, neither prophecy nor Astrology counted as heresy. He would have to have performed magic for this to have been a risk. It's said he always maintained a good relationship with the church.
8. He is said to have predicted his own death. He is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive at sunrise." Sure enough, he was found dead in his room the next morning.
9. Nostradamus has been credited with predicting numerous events in world history, including the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the atomic bomb, the rise of Adolph Hitler, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and the last pope. Yet Nostradamus himself, in a letter to his son, admitted that his quatrains were purposely written in a very vague way, suggesting that he intended for people to interpret them however they liked.
10. There have, over the years, been many internet hoaxes in which verses purported to have been written by Nostradamus and directly relating to historic events have gone viral. Some relate to 9/11; George W. Bush becoming President after a controversial election ("Come the millennium, month 12/In the home of greatest power/The village idiot will come forth/To be acclaimed the leader"). Another hoax even suggested that Nostradamus had predicted that when PSY's Gangnam Style video reached a billion views, the world would end: From the calm morning (reference to South Korea, PSY's birth country, known as the "land of morning calm",/the end will come/when of the dancing horse (reference to the dance routine that goes with the song)/the number of circles will be nine (the number of zeros in one billion). This hoaxer hadn't done their research, though, as they dated it 1503, when Nostradamus would have been less than a year old.