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Cowan George (b. 1920-02-15 / d. 2012-04-20)
He was an American physical chemist, a businessman and philanthropist. Cowan received a B.S. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1941. He did graduate studies at Princeton, where he worked under future Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose investigation of uranium confirmed the feasibility of the Fermi pile. He continued his nuclear research with the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, Oak Ridge, Columbia University, and Los Alamos. Because he was transferred to various locations as a technological troubleshooter for the effort, he was among the very few people with knowledge of the separate components of the bomb, kept apart for security reasons. He joined the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1946. He earned a Ph.D. from the Mellon College of Science in 1950. Weeks after his arrival at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1949, he directed the detection of radioactive fallout from samples collected near the Russian border indicating the Soviets were in possession of a nuclear bomb. He later served on the Bethe Panel that convinced government decision makers the radiochemistry detected represented weapons uses rather than peaceful pursuits.
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84
Born 1896-08-09. Domain:Philosophy. Cause of death:Age
He was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental theorist, well known for his work studying children, his theory of cognitive development and for his epistemological view called "genetic epistemology."
51
Born 1929-08-16. Domain:Music. Cause of death:alcohol, other drugs
Evans's chemical dependency problems most likely began during his stint with Miles Davis in the late 1950s. A heroin addict for much of his career, his health was generally poor and his financial situation worse for most of the 1960s. By the end of that decade he appeared to have succeeded in overcoming that drug problem, but during the 1970s cocaine became a serious and eventually fatal issue for Evans. His body finally gave out in the fall of 1980, when, ravaged by psychoactive drugs, a perforated liver, and a lifelong battle with hepatitis, he died in New York City of a bleeding ulcer, cirrhosis of the liver and bronchial pneumonia.
48
Born 1932-07-08. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Cancer
At the time of her death at the age of 48 from cancer, she was married to the director Elia Kazan, by whom she had one child. She was perhaps best-known for her role in Kazan's film, Splendor in the Grass (1961), in which she played Warren Beatty's sister, as well as for portraying a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe in Kazan's stage production of After the Fall, written by Monroe's former husband, playwright Arthur Miller.
41
Born 1938-11-05. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Heart attack
20
Born 1960-02-28. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Murder
She was murdered at age 20 by her estranged husband, an act that was the basis of two motion pictures. Stratten and Carol Willis are the only two Playmates who died within a year and a half after their Playboy appearance, both aged 20, the youngest a Playmate died.
Snider and Stratten met at Snider's duplex, in which the couple had once lived along with their friend, Dr. Stephen Cushner. Cushner still lived in the home with his girlfriend and his girlfriend's best friend, but Cushner and the women were all out for the day when Stratten showed up at the home. What exactly transpired is unknown; at noon, Snider's private investigator called the apartment. He was aware that Stratten and Snider were meeting, and wanted to make sure that everything was going smoothly. Snider told the detective "Everything is going fine" and hung up.
At 5:00 p.m., Cushner's girlfriend and her friend arrived home to find Stratten's car in the driveway. The door to Snider's room was closed and Stratten was nowhere to be seen; the women assumed that the two were in the bedroom and wanted privacy. They stayed until 6:00 p.m. to watch the news, then left at 6:30.
At 7:00 p.m., Cushner arrived home and found Stratten's car in the driveway. He assumed that Snider and Stratten wanted privacy. One hour later, at 8:00 p.m., Cushner's girlfriend and her friend arrived back home from dinner. At 11:00 p.m., the private investigator called Cushner. According to the investigator, Snider had given him instructions to periodically check in over the course of the day, but Snider hadn't answered his private line for some time. The investigator told Cushner that he believed something was wrong and that someone needed to check on Snider and Stratten.
Shortly after 11:00 p.m., Cushner entered Snider's room. There he discovered Stratten dead from a gunshot wound to the head and Snider from a self-inflicted gunshot. Peter Bogdanovich's movie They All Laughed (in which he had cast Stratten) received such bad press surrounding her death that no studio wanted to release it. Bogdanovich financed the release personally, but the movie proved to be a box office failure.
29
Born 1951-04-15. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Suicide
He was a photografer, who discovered and promoted (and married)Dorothy Stratten.
Dorothy and Paul's relationship had deteriorated to the point that they were separated by the summer of 1980. Dorothy developed a relationship with film director Peter Bogdanovich. Snider murdered her and committed suicide by gunshot. The killing took place in the west Los Angeles apartment the two had previously shared.
27
Born 1952-12-24. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Accident
He was a Grand Prix motorcycle road racer from France. His best year was in 1974 when he finished in third place in the 250cc and the 350cc world championships. Pons became the first Frenchman to win an F.I.M. world championship when he won the 1979 Formula 750 title. In 1980, he won the prestigious Daytona 200. He was killed in 1980 following an accident at the British Grand Prix.
He used to say "every fall is one ticket out of your stub book". His last one was at that British Grand Prix.
69
Born 1910-10-19. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Age
He was a French lexicographer and publisher, best-known for his large Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (1953), often called simply the Robert, and its abridgement, the Petit Robert (1967).
35
Born 1944-08-09. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Accident
He was driving at a private test session at Hockenheim, when a suspension failure pitched his car into the armco at the high-speed Ostkurve, inflicting fatal head injuries when the vehicle overturned and vaulted the barrier.
Buried in Crevant-Laveine (Puy-de-Dome)
60
Born 1919-10-26. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Cancer
He was the emperor of Iran from 16 September 1941, until his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979. He was the second and last monarch of the House of Pahlavi of the Iranian monarchy. After a long exile, the Shah returned to Egypt in March 1980, where he received urgent medical treatment but nevertheless died from complications of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
42
Born 1938-01-25. Domain:Art. Cause of death:alcohol, other drugs
After his divorce, Vysotsky fell in love with Marina Vlady, a French actress of Russian descent, who was working at Mosfilm on a joint Soviet-French production at that time. Marina had been married before and had 3 children, while Vladimir had two. Fueled by Marina's exotic status as a Frenchwoman in the USSR, and Vladimir's unmatched popularity in his country, their love was passionate and impulsive. They were married in 1969. For 10 years the two maintained a long-distance relationship as Marina compromised her career in France in order to spend more time in Moscow, and Vladimir's friends pulled strings in order for him to be allowed to travel abroad to stay with his wife. Marina eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the USSR, and provided Vladimir with some immunity against prosecution by the government, which was becoming weary of his covertly anti-Soviet lyrics and his odds-defying popularity with the masses. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs.
He died in Moscow at the age of 42 of heart failure.
54
Born 1925-09-08. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Heart attack
90
Born 1890-03-15. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Boris Nikolaevich Delaunay or Delone (Russian: Бори́с Никола́евич Делоне́) was one of the first Russian mountain climbers and a Soviet/Russian mathematician, and the father of physicist Nikolai Borisovich Delone. The spelling Delone is a straightforward transliteration from Cyrillic he often used in recent publications, while Delaunay is French language version he used in the early French and German publications. Boris Delone got his surname from his ancestor French Army officer De Launay, who was captured in Russia during the Napoleon's invasion of 1812. De Launay was a nephew of the Bastille governor marquis de Launay, married a woman from the Tukhachevsky noble family, and stayed in Russia. Boris Delaunay worked in the fields of modern algebra, the geometry of numbers. He used the results of Yevgraf Fyodorov, Hermann Minkowski, Georgy Voronoy, and others in his development of modern mathematical crystallography and general mathematical model of crystals.
66
Born 1913-10-19. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Infection (Lungs)
74
Born 1906-03-03. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Age
He was an American jazz clarinetist and tenor saxophonist, though primarily known for the clarinet.
50
Born 1930-06-14. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Cancer
Tania de Poliakoff-Baïdaroff had 3 sisters:
Olga (born 1928) : Olga Varen - TV Director
Militza (1932-1988) : Hélène Vallier - Actress
Catherine (born 1938) : Marina Vlady - Actress.
76
Born 1904-02-23. Domain:Directing. Cause of death:Age
He directed in 1961 La Nuit du loup-garou (The Curse of the Werewolf), which I saw at studios Bertrand in Paris as I was 13 year old. This was my first horror picture. I could not sleep for 2 nights.
76
Born 1904-02-27. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Accident
His victories included two Tours de France (he won 25 stages in nine rides). He died following a diving accident.
84
Born 1896-02-02. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Kazimierz Kuratowski was a Polish mathematician and logician. He was one of the leading representatives of the Warsaw School of Mathematics.
84
Born 1896-00-00. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Age
Cvjetko Popović (Serbian Cyrillic: Цвјетко Поповић) was a Bosnian Serb who was involved in the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.
85
Born 1895-10-22. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
He was one of the most famous Finnish mathematicians. He was particularly appreciated for his work in complex analysis. Rolf Nevanlinna did not participate actively in politics, but in the thirties he was known to sympathise with the right-wing Patriotic People's Movement party and, partly because of his half German ancestry, was leaning towards Germany. In the spring of 1941, Finland contributed a battalion of volunteers to the Waffen SS, which then fought on the Eastern Front. At the time, the battalion was considered to form a certain bond with Germany, as Germany and Finland both fought against the Soviet Union, without a formal alliance. In 1942, an official SS Volunteer Committee was established in Finland to take care of the battalion's somewhat strained relations with its German superiors. Rolf Nevanlinna was chosen to be the chairman of the committee, as a person respected in Germany but loyal to Finland. The battalion was finally brought back to Finland and disbanded in 1943. Nevanlinna's Nazi sympathies during the war did not affect his mathematical contacts. His election to the presidency of the IMU was almost unanimous. In 1950 the Soviet mathematical community was isolated from their Western colleagues. The International Colloquium on Function Theory in Helsinki in 1957, directed by Nevanlinna, was the first post-war occasion when the Soviet mathematicians could contact their Western colleagues in person. In 1965, Rolf Nevanlinna was an honorary guest in a function theory congress in Armenia.
54
Born 1926-03-06. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
Kim Jae-gyu was a South Korean politician, army lieutenant general and the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. He assassinated South Korean President Park Chung-hee, who had been one of his closest friends, on October 26, 1979, and was subsequently executed by hanging on May 24, 1980. He remains a controversial figure with many contradictions: he is regarded by some as a patriot who ended Park's 18-year military dictatorship, and by others as a traitor who killed his long-time benefactor out of personal grievance. For many years, the latter was the prevailing view, but later revelations in the early 2000s about Kim's relationship with some leaders of the democracy movement prompted a re-evaluation in some circles.
23
Born 1956-07-15. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Suicide
Curtis's last live performance on May 2, 1980 at Birmingham University was held in the same month as his death and included Joy Division's first and last performance of the song "Ceremony", which was later used by New Order. The last song Curtis ever performed in front of an audience was "Digital". The recording of this performance can be found on the compilation album Still.
The effects of his epilepsy and personal problems, such as an impending divorce from his wife, may have contributed to Curtis's suicide by hanging at the age of 23. According to the book Touching From A Distance, Curtis had taken an overdose of his epilepsy medication and ended up in hospital only a few months before his death. The overdose was believed to be a 'cry for help' but Curtis himself was said to have told his bandmates that he hadn't meant to overdose. The book states that Bernard Sumner took him to a graveyard after he had left hospital to show him where he would have ended up had the overdose killed him. The night Curtis died, days before Joy Division was to begin its first American tour, he watched one of his favourite movies, Stroszek by Werner Herzog. He later hanged himself in his kitchen while reportedly listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot. On top of the LP cover was a small cut out photograph of a moon struck dying sky taken by artist David Horvitz. Curtis's viewing and listening choices continue to generate speculation as to the true reasons why he took his life.
Curtis was cremated and his ashes were buried in Macclesfield, with the inscription on his memorial stone reading, "Love Will Tear Us Apart". The epitaph, chosen by Deborah Curtis, is a reference to Joy Division's best-known song.
88
Born 1892-05-07. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Age
In January 1980, Tito was admitted to Klinični center Ljubljana (the clinical centre in Ljubljana, Slovenia) with circulation problems in his legs. His left leg was amputated soon afterwards. He died there, three days before his 88th birthday.
