The writer Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, is widely known as a French physician, astrologer and prophet. Nostradamus remains famous over four hundred years after his death mostly for a 1555 book he wrote titled "Centuries," a collection of one thousand quatrains (four-line rhyming verses) which are said to foretell the future.

Depending on various sources, Nostradamus has been credited with accurately predicting the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945; the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986; the French Revolution in 1789; the Apollo moon landing in 1969; the death of Princess Diana in 1997; both World Wars, and so on. In fact you'd be hard pressed to name some significant global event that Nostradamus was not said, by someone, to have foreseen.