Which famous scientist was born the year Galileo died?

Newton, born in 1642, the year Galileo died - which is a tidy fact with a wrinkle in it. England was still using the Julian calendar; by the Gregorian calendar already used in Catholic Europe, Newton was born on 4 January 1643. The coincidence works only if you use two different calendars at once, which almost everyone repeating it does without noticing.

He was born prematurely and was reportedly not expected to survive the day - small enough, his mother said, to fit in a quart pot. His father had died three months earlier, his mother remarried and left him with his grandmother, and he appears to have hated his stepfather with some intensity; a list of sins he wrote at nineteen includes threatening to burn the house down over them both.

The Galileo connection is real in a way the birthdate is not. Galileo established that motion continues without a cause and that all objects fall at the same rate, which is the ground Newton's first law stands on - and Newton's own line about standing on the shoulders of giants, usually read as modest, was written in a letter to Robert Hooke, with whom he was in a bitter dispute and who was notably short.