Birthdays Today

July 20, 2026

Birthdays Today: July 20

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Eighty-two living people we could verify share today's birthday, from guitar legend Carlos Santana and supermodel Gisele Bündchen to Grey's Anatomy's Sandra Oh and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, plus five notable people, including a headliner, all born on the exact same July day in 1973: an NHL Hall of Famer, a future king, a television doctor, a Test fast bowler, and a World Cup soccer captain.

The headliners

Carlos Santana turns 79 today, and few guitarists have a sound you can name in two notes. Born in Autlán de Navarro, Mexico, he broke out at Woodstock in August 1969, the same summer his debut album arrived, and he has been bending blues, rock, and Afro-Cuban rhythms into something unmistakably his ever since. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted his band in 1998. The astonishing part is the comeback: thirty years after Woodstock, his 1999 album Supernatural) won nine Grammy Awards in a single night, tying Michael Jackson's record for one evening, and made Santana the first Latino to win Album of the Year. Its lead single, "Smooth") with Rob Thomas, spent 12 weeks at number one. It was the first chart-topping hit of his life, and he was 52.

Gisele Bündchen turns 46 today, and for the better part of two decades she was the highest-paid model in the world. Born in the small southern Brazilian town of Horizontina, she was discovered at 13 at a McDonald's in a São Paulo shopping mall during a school trip and moved to São Paulo at 14 to model, landing her first big break at New York Fashion Week in 1996. She became the face of an entire era of fashion, walked her final runway in 2015, and later built a second career as an environmental activist funding reforestation in the Amazon. The surprising part is the family: she is a fraternal twin, born five minutes before her sister Patricia, who has managed her career for years, and she is one of six sisters. She was married to Tom Brady from 2009 to 2022.

Sandra Oh turns 55 today, and she owns two of the most-watched television characters of the last 20 years. She is Dr. Cristina Yang on Grey's Anatomy, the role that made her a household name across ten seasons, and Eve Polastri on Killing Eve. On Killing Eve she became, in 2018, the first actor of Asian heritage ever nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama, and she won the Golden Globe for it, the first woman of Asian descent to take that prize in 40 years. Born in Nepean, Ontario, to Korean immigrant parents, her mother a biochemist and her father a businessman, she started in ballet at four to correct pigeon toes. She was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2022, and Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019.

Enrique Peña Nieto turns 60 today, and he served as the 64th president of Mexico for a single six-year term, from December 2012 to November 2018. A member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, he had previously been governor of the State of Mexico, the country's most populous state, and as president he pushed through a bundle of structural reforms, covering energy, education, and telecommunications, under a cross-party agreement called the Pacto por México. The surprising part is the marriage: in 2010 he married Angélica Rivera, one of Mexico's biggest telenovela stars, known as "La Gaviota," who then became First Lady for his entire presidency. They divorced in 2019, shortly after he left office, and he has kept a low profile since, spending time in Madrid.

Peter Forsberg turns 53 today, and hockey fans rank him among the greatest to ever play. Born in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, he won two Stanley Cups with the Colorado Avalanche in 1996 and 2001, took the Hart Trophy as NHL MVP and the Art Ross Trophy as top scorer in 2003, and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2014. In 2017 he was named to the NHL's 100 Greatest Players list. The genuinely startling detail is from before all of that: at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, as a 20-year-old, he scored the shootout goal that won Sweden its first ever Olympic hockey gold, a one-handed backhand against Canada's Corey Hirsch. The image was put on a Swedish postage stamp, a spot otherwise reserved almost exclusively for the monarchy. He won a second Olympic gold in 2006.

Gerd Binnig turns 79 today, on the exact same July day in 1947 as Carlos Santana, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Working with Heinrich Rohrer at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, he invented the scanning tunneling microscope, which in 1981 produced the first-ever images of individual atoms and is widely credited with opening the door to nanotechnology. He later co-invented the atomic force microscope and won the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2016. The charming part is the origin story: as a teenager in postwar Frankfurt he played guitar in a Beatles cover band and, by his own account, decided to become a physicist at age 10 without actually knowing what that involved. His wife, a psychologist, was the one who talked him into accepting the IBM offer that led to the microscope.

Before the roll call

One coincidence worth pausing on. Five notable people, including a headliner above, were all born on this exact day in 1973 and all turn 53: Peter Forsberg, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway (the heir to the throne), Omar Epps (House's Dr. Foreman), Nixon McLean (a West Indies Test fast bowler), and Claudio Reyna (a United States World Cup captain). A hockey Hall of Famer, a future king, a television doctor, a fast bowler, and a soccer captain, scattered across four continents, all blowing out 53 candles today.

And for good measure, five more share this day in 1964, all turning 62: Terri Irwin, Dean Winters, Bernd Schneider), Murray Craven, and Sebastiano Rossi.

Also celebrating today

Screen and stage

Music

Sports

Public life, business and world figures

Writers, art, science and media

That’s the reading for this issue.