* Andrew Ainslie Common ( 1841 – 1903 ), built his own very large reflecting telescopes and demonstrated that photography could record astronomical features invisible to the human eye.

* 1903 – The Kishinev pogrom in Kishinev ( Bessarabia ) begins, forcing tens of thousands of Jews to later seek refuge in Israel and the Western world.

* 1903 – Mickey Cochrane, American baseball player ( d. 1962 )

* 1903 – Harold Edgerton, American electrical engineer ( d. 1990 )

* 1903 – Jan Tinbergen, Dutch economist, recipient of the Bank of Sweden Prize ( d. 1994 )

* 1903 – Ferenc Keserű, Hungarian water polo player ( d. 1968 )

* 1819 – Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet, Irish-English mathematician and physicist ( d. 1903 )

After what the MCC saw as the problems of the earlier professional and amateur series they decided to take control of organising tours themselves, and this led to the first MCC tour of Australia in 1903 – 04.

* 1903 – Fall of the Ottoman Empire: an unsuccessful uprising led by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization against Ottoman Turkey, also known as the Ilinden – Preobrazhenie Uprising, takes place.

In Serbia Nikola Pašić ( 1845 – 1926 ) and his Radical Party dominated Serbian politics after 1903 ; they also monopolized power in Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1929 ; during the dictatorship of the 1930s, it furnished the prime minister.

* 1903 – Macedonian rebels in Kruševo proclaim the Kruševo Republic, which exists only for 10 days before Ottoman Turks lay waste to the town.

* 1903 – Habib Bourguiba, Tunisian politician ( d. 2000 )

* 1903 – Louis Leakey, Kenyan-English archaeologist ( d. 1972 )

* 1903 – A 30 million cubic-metre landslide kills 70 in Frank, Alberta, Canada.

* 1876 – Alexander I of Serbia ( d. 1903 )

* Adrian ( costume designer ) ( 1903 – 1959 ), born Adrian Adolph Greenberg, costume designer for over 250 films

* Adrian Rollini ( 1903 – 1956 ), American multi-instrumentalist best known for his jazz music

* 1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho allegedly flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers.

* 1903 – James Gould Cozzens, American novelist ( d. 1978 )

* 1903 – Lewis Sargent, American actor ( d. 1970 )

* 1826 – Karl Gegenbaur, German anatomist ( d. 1903 )

* 1903 – Arpad Elo, American chess player, created the Elo rating system ( d. 1992 )

Alexander I or Aleksandar Obrenović ( Cyrillic: Александар Обреновић ; 14 August 1876 – 11 June 1903 ) was king of Serbia from 1889 to 1903 when he and his wife, Queen Draga, were assassinated by a group of Army officers, led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević

Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age.

* 1903 – Malcolm Muggeridge, British author and scholar ( d. 1990 )

* 1903, 10 May, Hans Jonas, died 5 Feb. 1993, Jewish-German philosopher and scholar, wrote extensively on ethics among other topics

* August 9-Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar ( died 1903 )

George Granville Bradley ( 11 December 1821 – 13 March 1903 ) was an English divine, scholar, and schoolteacher.

The first modern scholar to reconstruct the history of the ancient polity of Funan was Paul Pelliot, who in his ground-breaking article " Le Fou-nan " of 1903 drew exclusively on Chinese historical records in order to set forth the sequence of documented events connecting the foundation of Funan in approximately the 1st century C. E.

Bruno Paulin Gaston Paris ( August 9, 1839 – March 5, 1903 ) was a French writer and scholar.

A search of Spanish archives in 1903 by scholar Pascual de Gayangos and a search of Peruvian archives in 2003 by historian Jorge Ortiz-Sotelo found no mention of Bass.

* Albert Hugh Smith ( 1903 – 1967 ), English topographer and language scholar

* February 2-Louis-Marie Régis, philosopher, theologian, scholar and member of the Dominican Order ( b. 1903 )

Dr. Emerson retired in 1903 and William J. Rolfe, a Shakespearean scholar and actor, was named the second President of Emerson College of Oratory.

* T. N. Ramachandran ( 1903 – 1973 ), art historian, artist, archaeologist and a Sanskrit scholar

* Girolamo De Rada ( 1814 – 1903 ), poet, folklorist and Albanian nationalist, among the major intellectual scholar of the Albanian language and Arbëreshë folklore.

* Abul Ala Maududi one of the Muslim scholar ( 1903 – 1979 ) was born in Aurangabad, India.

* James Montgomery Beck, Class of 1880, United States Attorney for Pennsylvania, 1896 – 1900 ; Assistant Attorney General of the United States, 1900 – 1903 ; Solicitor General of the United States, 1921 – 1925 ; Member of United States House of Representatives, 1927 – 1934 ; and noted constitutional law scholar.

* James Montgomery Beck, Class of 1880 and Trustee, United States Attorney for Pennsylvania, 1896 – 1900 ; Assistant Attorney General of the United States, 1900 – 1903 ; Solicitor General of the United States, 1921 – 1925 ; Member of United States House of Representatives, 1927 – 1934 ; and noted constitutional law scholar ; his most famous book, The Constitution of the United States ( 1924 ), sold over 50, 000 copies, including translations in German and French ; President of the Philadelphia Shakespeare Society from 1913 until his death in April 1936 ; elected a bencher of Gray ’ s Inn in 1914, being the first foreigner in 600 years to receive that distinction ; received decorations from France and Belgium

A 1903 proposition to elect a law scholar ( Ebbe Hertzberg ) was rejected.

* Eric A. Havelock ( 1903 – 1988 ), British ( later Canadian and American ) scholar

* Edward A. Jones ( born 1903 ), African-American linguist, scholar and diplomat

" Although Tolkien most likely was not the originator because he was merely 11 years old in 1903 when a strange novel called “ Gee-Boy ” — which also alludes to the aesthetic properties of cellar door — was published by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper.

Joseph studied at the Torah Lehranstalt until 1903, when he was awarded semicha ( rabbinic ordination ), and in 1905 he completed university studies at the University of Strasbourg with a PhD on the work of legal scholar Anselm von Feuerbach.

The Danish scholar Axel Olrik ( 1903 ) has proposed a solution to why the sources vary.

* Daniel Silvan Evans ( 1818 – 1903 ), Welsh scholar and lexicographer

Daniel Silvan Evans ( 11 January 1818 – 12 April 1903 ) was a Welsh scholar and lexicographer.

In 1903 – 4 a Viennese ex-Cistercian monk, Bible scholar and inventor named Jörg Lanz-Liebenfels ( subsequently, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels ) published a lengthy article under the Latin title ' Anthropozoon Biblicum ' (" The Biblical Man-Animal ") in a journal for Biblical studies edited by Moritz Altschüler, a Jewish admirer of Guido von List.