×
Cho Seung-Hui (b. 1984-01-18 / d. 2007-04-16)
He committed suicide after law enforcement officers breached the doors of the academic building in which he had killed 30 of his 32 victims and wounded many more, both faculty and students.
Lookup: name or firstname or alias or date (yyyy-mm-dd):
51
Born 1945-10-05. Domain:Music. Cause of death:alcohol, other drugs
He was a Scottish musician, best known as the lead singer of the English rock band, Sweet.
During the early 1990s Brian Connolly would play and tour particularly outdoor festivals in Europe, with his band.
By 1995, Brian Connolly had released a new album and this was entitled Let's Go. However, by the late 1990s Connolly's previous drinking problem had taken a toll on his body, and he died of liver failure on 9 February 1997. He was survived by two daughters, Nicola and Michelle, and a son Brian James (BJ) who lives in the south of Spain.
76
Born 1920-03-20. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Stroke
In 1939, while working at the Foreign Office in London doing French to English translations, Pamela met Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill. Randolph proposed to her on the very evening they met, and they were married in October 4, 1939. When she became pregnant three months later, she went to live with her in-laws at 10 Downing Street. Two days after Randolph Churchill took his seat in the House of Commons, their son Winston was born. Shortly after birth Pamela and the newborn were photographed by Cecil Beaton for Life Magazine, its first cover of a mother with baby.
After her divorce from Randolph Churchill, she moved to Paris and in 1948 began her five-year-long affair with Gianni Agnelli. She described this as the happiest period of her life. Agnelli, however, was not faithful in this relationship. In 1952, Pamela surprised him with a young woman, Anne-Marie d'Estainville, and threw a rare fit. Agnelli sustained a severe leg injury in a car accident while bringing d'Estainville home. Pamela nursed him through his injury, and later became pregnant (although it was never confirmed that this was by Agnelli), but had an abortion in Switzerland. Later, Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto became pregnant by Agnelli, and Pamela Churchill ended the affair.
Her next significant relationship was with Baron Elie de Rothschild, who was married. He supported her financially, and she was schooled in art history and wine-making during this clandestine and short relationship. During this time she also entertained an affair with the writer Maurice Druon and with the shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos.
74
Born 1922-10-04. Domain:Journalism. Cause of death:Unknown
Craft=Sport, then Reporter. Death occured in the night of the 19 to the 20th
60
Born 1936-03-01. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Heart attack
In 1991, L'Idiot international was one of the only newspaper to criticize the Gulf War, and Jean-Edern Hallier went to Iraq to cover the war. Some time before, he had published Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), and personally delivered an exemplary of the book to the Iranian embassy in Paris.
He died opportunedly from a heart attack while riding his bike.
52
Born 1944-03-07. Domain:Music. Cause of death:alcohol, other drugs
John Townes Van Zandt was an American singer-songwriter. He wrote numerous songs, such as "Pancho and Lefty", "For the Sake of the Song", "Tecumseh Valley", "Rex's Blues", and "To Live Is to Fly", that are widely considered masterpieces of American songwriting. His musical style has often been described as melancholy and features rich, poetic lyrics. During his early years, Van Zandt was respected for his guitar playing and fingerpicking ability. Much of Van Zandt's life was spent touring various dive bars, often living in cheap motel rooms and backwood cabins. For much of the 1970s, he lived in a simple shack without electricity or a telephone. He suffered from a series of drug addictions and alcoholism, and was given a psychiatric diagnosis of bipolar disorder. When he was young, the now-discredited insulin shock therapy erased much of his long-term memory. Van Zandt died on New Year's Day 1997 from cardiac arrythmia caused by health problems stemming from years of substance abuse.
90
Born 1906-09-30. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Age
Mireille Hartuch was a French singer, composer, and actress. She was generally known by the stage name "Mireille," it being a common practice of the time to use a single name for the stage. Fluent in English, she spent two years in the United States, first in New York City where she performed on Broadway, then in Hollywood, where she appeared in films. In 1931, she appeared in L'aviateur with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Buster se marie with Buster Keaton. Meanwhile in France, contemporary stars Maurice Chevalier, Jean Sablon, and Charles Trenet (who credited Mireille with introducing "swing" to France), charted hits with her compositions, launching her songwriting career.
6
Born 1990-08-06. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
She was an American child beauty pageant contestant made famous by her murder and the subsequent media coverage. She was found dead in the basement of her parents' home in Boulder, Colorado, nearly eight hours after she was reported missing. The case is notable in both its longevity and the media interest it has generated in the United States. After several grand jury hearings, the case is still unsolved.
The results of the autopsy revealed that JonBenét was killed by strangulation and a skull fracture. A garrote made from a length of tweed cord and the broken handle of a paintbrush had been used to strangle her; her skull had suffered severe blunt trauma; there was no evidence of conventional rape, although sexual assault could not be ruled out. The official cause of death was asphyxiation due to strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma.
39
Born 1957-07-28. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
72
Born 1924-09-28. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:cancer (pancreas)
When Mastroianni died in 1996, the Trevi Fountain, which is so famously associated with him due to his role in Fellini's La dolce vita, was symbolically turned off and draped in black as a tribute.
78
Born 1918-04-07. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age
He was an English actor and writer best known in the U.S. for starring in a weekly Sherlock Holmes television series in 1954. He was the son of actor Leslie Howard.
83
Born 1913-07-18. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Age
92
Born 1904-07-02. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Age
There are numerous explanations of why Lacoste was originally nicknamed the Crocodile (or the Alligator). A 2006 New York Times obituary about Lacoste's son, Bernard, provides an apparently authoritative one. In the 1920s, supposedly, Lacoste made a bet with his team captain about whether he would win a certain match. The stakes were a suitcase he had seen in a Boston store; it was made of crocodile (or alligator) skin. Later, René Lacoste's friend Robert George embroidered a crocodile onto a blazer that Lacoste wore for his matches.
85
Born 1911-01-16. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Age
He was a French racing cyclist who won the 1937 Tour de France.
In addition, Lapébie won the 1934 and 1937 editions of the Critérium National. He was born at Bayonne, Aquitaine, and died in Pessac.
89
Born 1907-04-18. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
One of the first recipients of the Fiels Medal.
71
Born 1925-09-28. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Accident
Cray died of head and neck injuries suffered in a traffic collision on September 22, 1996. Cray had been hospitalized two weeks since his SUV was struck in a multicar rollover accident on Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His Jeep Cherokee vehicle was designed using a Cray supercomputer.
80
Born 1916-02-14. Domain:Directing. Cause of death:Heart
He was a Japanese film director. 1962: Seppuku On May 16, 1630, Hanshiro Tsugumo arrives at the estate of the Iyi clan, looking for a suitable place to commit seppuku. At the time, it is told, it was fairly common for disgraced samurai to make the same request, or threat, in the hope of receiving alms from the lord of the house. To deter him therefrom, Kageyu Saito, counselor of the clan, tells Hanshiro a warning story wherein another ronin, Motome Chijiiwa – formerly of the same clan as Hanshiro – had made the same request and the samurai retainers of the house forced him to complete the ceremony and kill himself. When Motome's sword was revealed to be a fake made of bamboo, they insisted that he disembowel himself with it, so that Motome's death was agonizingly painful. Despite this warning, Tsugumo maintains his request to commit seppuku. While preparing for the suicide, Hanshiro Tsugumo recounts to Saito and the retainers that his lord's house was considered a threat and toppled by the shogunate, whereupon his friend, another samurai, committed seppuku and left Tsugumo to look after his son, Motome Chijiiwa. Required to protect Chijiiwa and support his own daughter Miho, Hanshiro was unable to kill himself, and instead lived in poverty and worked menial jobs to support his family. In later years Chijiwa and Miho were married and had a son, Kingo; but continued to live in poverty. When Miho and Kingo became ill and could not afford to pay a physician, Chijiiwa threatened seppuku at a lord's house. Soon after his seppuku, Miho and Kingo died from their illnesses. Hanshiro then reveals that before coming to the Iyi house, he tracked down two retainers of the house, Hayato Yazaki and Umenosuke Kawabe, whom he defeated easily and disgraced them by cutting off their topknots. A third retainer, Hikokuro Omodaka, comes to Hanshiro's home and challenges him to a ritual duel. Hanshiro and Hikokuro climatically duel in a brief but tense sword fight, where Hanshiro breaks Hikokuro's sword. Instead of honorably surrendering, Hikokuro continues to fight and his topknot is taken as well. When Hanshiro finishes his account, Saito angrily orders the retainers to kill him; whereupon Tsugomo kills four and wounds eight while slowly succumbing to his wounds. When a new group of retainers arrive armed with guns, Tsugumo attempts seppuku, but is shot nevertheless. Kawabe and Yazaki are ordered to commit seppuku, while Omodaka is reported to have done so already; their deaths, and the four inflicted by Hanshiro, are reported as from "illness", lest word be transmitted that the Iyi House has lost face to a ronin.
81
Born 1914-12-10. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age
Lamour's lack of pretension and good humor allowed her to have a remarkably long career in show business for someone best known as a glamour girl. She was a popular draw on the dinner theatre circuit of the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s, she lived with her longtime husband William Ross Howard III (whom she married in 1943), in the Hampton suburb of Towson, Maryland. After he died in 1978, Lamour kicked her career into high gear, publishing her autobiography My Side of the Road in 1980, reviving her nightclub act, and performing in plays and acting on such television shows as Hart to Hart, Crazy Like a Fox, and Murder She Wrote.
83
Born 1913-03-26. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Heart attack
He was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. He is also known for his "legendarily eccentric" personality. His life was documented in the film N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, made while he was still alive. Because of his prolific output, friends created the Erdős number as a humorous tribute. An Erdős number describes a person's degree of separation from Erdős himself, based on their collaboration with him, or with another who has their own Erdős number. Erdős alone was assigned the Erdős number of 0 (for being himself), while his immediate collaborators could claim an Erdős number of 1, their collaborators have Erdős number at most 2, and so on. Approximately 200,000 mathematicians have an assigned Erdős number, and some have estimated that 90 percent of the world's active mathematicians have an Erdős number smaller than 8 (not surprising in light of the small world phenomenon). Due to collaborations with mathematicians, many scientists in fields such as physics, engineering, biology, and economics have Erdős numbers as well. It is said that Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron has an Erdős number of 1 because they both autographed the same baseball when Emory University awarded them honorary degrees on the same day. Erdős numbers have also been assigned to an infant, a horse, and several actors. The Erdős number was most likely first defined by Casper Goffman, an analyst whose own Erdős number is 1. Goffman published his observations about Erdős' prolific collaboration in a 1969 article titled "And what is your Erdős number?" He died "in action" of a heart attack at the age of 83, while attending a conference in Warsaw, Poland. Erdős never married and had no children.
25
Born 1971-06-16. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Murder
On September 7, 1996, Shakur attended the Mike Tyson - Bruce Seldon boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. After the boxing match, Shakur spotted 21 year-old Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, a member of the Southside Crips in the MGM Grand lobby. Shakur rushed him and knocked Anderson down, and Shakur's entourage beat him. The incident was captured on the hotel's video surveillance. Anderson and a group of Crips had beaten up a member of Death Row's entourage in a Foot Locker a few weeks earlier, precipitating Shakur's attack. After the fight with Anderson, Shakur met up with Suge Knight to go to Death Row-owned Club 662 (now known as restaurant/club Seven). Shakur rode with Knight in Knight's 1996 black BMW 750i sedan, as part of a larger convoy of cars including some of Shakur's friends, The Outlawz, and bodyguards.
At approximately 11:15 p.m., while stopped at the intersection of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, Shakur was shot at several times in a drive-by shooting. Shakur was struck by four bullets out of the twelve shots that were fired at him; he was hit twice in the chest, and once each in his left arm and thigh, while Knight was grazed in the head by a piece of glass.
At the time of the shooting, Shakur was riding alongside with Suge Knight, with his bodyguard following behind in a vehicle belonging to Kidada Jones, Shakur's then-fiancée.
After arriving on the scene, police and paramedics took Shakur and Knight to the University Medical Center. Shakur was placed on life support until his death six days later. The official cause of death was respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. After his death, Shakur's body was cremated. His ashes were spread over Los Angeles, the Pacific Ocean, Shakur's aunt's land and his mother's land in North Carolina, and some has been mixed with marijuana and smoked by The Outlawz. Family and friends plan to spread the remaining ashes during a ceremony in Soweto, South Africa. The ceremony has been delayed from September 13, 2006, to June 16, 2007, which would have been Shakur's 36th birthday.
Although no one has ever been formally charged, nor publicly identified by the police as a suspect, police sources have indicated they believe that Anderson (who has since been murdered himself) was the killer. Officers in the Compton, California Police Department Gang Unit claimed in a leaked report the Crips were bragging about the killing soon after Anderson returned from Las Vegas.
Because of the acrimony between Notorious B.I.G. and Shakur, there was speculation from the outset about the possibility of Wallace's involvement in the murder. Wallace vehemently denied involvement.
79
Born 1917-06-24. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE (née Clarke) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist best known for her work as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted Nazi Germany's secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946. Hugh Alexander, head of Hut 8 from 1943 to 1944, described her as "one of the best Banburists in the section". Alexander himself was regarded as the best of the Banburists. He and I. J. Good considered the process more an intellectual game than a job. It was "not easy enough to be trivial, but not difficult enough to cause a nervous breakdown". Banburismus was a cryptanalytic process developed by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in Britain during the Second World War. It was used by Bletchley Park's Hut 8 to help break German Kriegsmarine (naval) messages enciphered on Enigma machines. The process used sequential conditional probability to infer information about the likely settings of the Enigma machine. It gave rise to Turing's invention of the ban as a measure of the weight of evidence in favour of a hypothesis. This concept was later applied in Turingery and all the other methods used for breaking the Lorenz cipher. Clarke and Turing had been close friends since soon after they met, and continued to be until Turing's death in 1954. They shared many hobbies and had similar personalities. They became very good friends at Bletchley Park. Turing arranged their shifts so they could work together, and they also spent much of their free time together. In early 1941, Turing proposed marriage to Clarke, and subsequently introduced her to his family. Although privately admitting his homosexuality to her—she was reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation—Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage, and broke up with Clarke in mid-1941. Clarke later admitted that she suspected Turing's homosexuality for some time, and it was not much of a surprise when he made the admission to her.
42
Born 1953-11-29. Domain:Other. Cause of death:Suicide
Suicide by defenestration.
62
Born 1933-09-27. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:cancer (brain)
In 1966, Greg Morris was cast in his most recognizable role as the electronics expert Barney Collier in the TV series Mission: Impossible. Along with Peter Lupus and Bob Johnson, he would be the only other actor to remain with the series throughout its entire run.
Shortly before his death, he went to see the film version of Mission: Impossible that starred Tom Cruise. The reports were that he hated the movie so much (an opinion that was shared by several of his former co-stars) that he left the theater early.
55
Born 1941-07-18. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Unknown
Jean-Pierre Maurin (real name Jean-Pierre Marie Henri Bourdeaux) was a French actor. He was the son of Mado Maurin.
89
Born 1907-06-01. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Cancer (lung)
Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle was a British Royal Air Force (RAF) engineer officer. He is credited with independently inventing the turbojet engine (some years earlier than Germany's Dr. Hans von Ohain) and is regarded by many as the father of jet propulsion. Von Ohain allegedly stated that if the RAF had taken Whittle's design seriously when it was first submitted, there would have been no World War II. As it was found later in the war the fighter superiority over Europe was key to winning the war in Europe.