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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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53
Born 1968-11-29. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:AIDS
Charlotte Valandrey was a French actress and author. After early success she was widely tipped for stardom, but her career took a more modest course until the release of her autobiography in 2005. After being revealed, at the age of sixteen, by the film Red Kiss, she lives alone in a studio that her parents bought for her. Carefree and uninformed about the dangers involved, she had affairs with “a drug-addicted musician, and other boys at risk”. In 1986, a few days before her eighteenth birthday, she learned that she was HIV-positive. In 1999, she met Arthur Lecaisne with whom she married on 17 July 1999 at Pléneuf-Val-André. At the beginning of 2000, they had a daughter, Tara who is HIV-negative. While separating from Arthur in 2002 and following a triple therapy which damaged her heart and caused her two heart attacks, her heart broke down, necrotic, and left her with only 10% heart capacity. On 4 November 2003, she received a transplant. In her book L'Amour dans le sang (published in 2005), she recounts her other love stories, with her cardiologist or Yann, an architect whom she intimately believes to be the husband of her late donor. In March 2007, after selling over 280,000 copies of her book, Charlotte gave approval for its adaptation in the TV movie, L'Amour dans le sang. Produced by Dominique Besnehard for Mon Voisin Productions, it was first broadcast on 23 November 2008 on France 3. On 8 June 2022, she announced that she was waiting for a second heart transplant because of new health problems. She received it on 14 June at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital but the transplant did not take. Charlotte Valandrey died on 13 July 2022, at the age of 53. Charlotte was a patron of the Greffe de vie ("Foundation of Life Registry") and was committed to the cause of organ donation and transplantation.
98
Born 1917-11-11. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fano was born in Turin, Italy in 1917 to a Jewish family and grew up in Turin. Fano's father was the mathematician Gino Fano, his older brother was the physicist Ugo Fano, and Giulio Racah was a cousin. Fano studied engineering as an undergraduate at the School of Engineering of Torino until 1939, when he emigrated to the United States as a result of anti-Jewish legislation passed under Benito Mussolini. He received his S.B. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1941, and upon graduation joined the staff of the MIT Radiation Laboratory. His thesis, titled "Theoretical Limitations on the Broadband Matching of Arbitrary Impedances", was supervised by Ernst Guillemin. In information theory, Fano's inequality relates the average information lost in a noisy channel to the probability of the categorization error. It was derived by Robert Fano in the early 1950s while teaching a Ph.D. seminar in information theory at MIT, and later recorded in his 1961 textbook.
84
Born 1930-03-06. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Pneumonia
He was an American conductor, violinist and composer. Making his debut at the conducting podium at the age of eight, he embarked on his career in earnest in 1953, establishing a reputation in European concert halls by 1960 but, by comparison, his career in the U.S. progressed far more slowly. However, he would later be appointed music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic (NYP), among other posts. Well-regarded in baton technique and possessing a photographic memory for scores, described as mercurial and forbidding in rehearsal, he mellowed in old age.
31
Born 1982-05-11. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:alcohol, other drugs
Cory Allan Michael Monteith was a Canadian actor, singer, and musician best known for his role as Finn Hudson on the Fox television series Glee. As an actor based in British Columbia, Monteith had minor roles on television series before being cast on Glee. During his success in that show, Monteith's film work included Monte Carlo and a starring role in Sisters & Brothers (both 2011). Monteith had a troubled adolescence involving substance abuse from age 13, and left school at age 16. After an intervention by family and friends, he entered drug rehabilitation at age 19. In a 2011 interview with Parade magazine, he discussed his history of substance abuse as a teen, and in March 2013, he again sought treatment for addiction. On July 13, 2013, he died of a toxic combination of heroin and alcohol in a Vancouver hotel room.
87
Born 1919-02-05. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:cardiovascular disease
José Ferrer chose Buttons to appear in a Broadway show The Admiral Had a Wife. The show was a farce set in Pearl Harbor, and it was due to open on December 8, 1941. It never did, as it was deemed inappropriate after the Japanese attack. In later years Buttons would joke that the Japanese only attacked Pearl Harbor to keep him off of Broadway.
85
Born 1897-11-29. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age
Arsenic and old lace.
29
Born 1937-11-30. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Other
On the day's main climb, Mont Ventoux, Simpson broke away early, but was soon passed by the eventual stage winner, Julio Jiminez, and four others. About two kilometres from the summit, Simpson began to zig-zag erratically across the road, eventually falling against an embankment. While his team car helpers wanted him to retire from the race, Simpson insisted on being put back on his cycle and he continued for another 500m or so before again beginning to falter; he toppled unconscious into the arms of his helpers, still gripping his handlebars. Despite mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and the administration of oxygen, plus a helicopter airlift to a nearby hospital, Simpson died. Two tubes of amphetamines and a further empty tube were found in the rear pocket of his racing jersey.
47
Born 1907-07-06. Domain:Painting. Cause of death:Pneumonia
Kahlo contracted polio at age six, which left her right leg looking thinner sometimes than the other (a deformity Kahlo hid by wearing long skirts). As a girl, she participated in boxing and other sports. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of Mexico's premier schools, where she was one of only 35 girls. Kahlo joined a gang at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution.
In September of 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail impaled her abdomen, piercing her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability. Though she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She would undergo as many as 35 operations in her life as a result of the accident, mainly on her back and her right leg and foot.
A few days before Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, she wrote in her diary: "I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to return - Frida.". The official cause of death was given as pulmonary embolism, though some suspected that she had died from overdose; an overdose that may or may not have been accidental.
77
Born 1874-09-13. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Age
Schoenberg's experience of triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), which possibly began in 1908 with the composition of op. 15, no. 13 (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96), and his superstitious nature may have triggered his death. According to an unverified anecdote on a website, he feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of 13. He so dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday that a friend asked composer and astrologist Dane Rudhyar to prepare Schoenberg's horoscope. Rudhyar did this and told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal. But in 1951, on his seventy-sixth birthday, the Viennese musician and astrologist Oskar Adler wrote Schoenberg a note warning him that the year was a critical one: 7 + 6 = 13. This stunned and depressed the composer, for up to that point he had only been wary of multiples of 13 and never considered adding the digits of his age. He became obsessed with this idea and many friends report that he frequently said: "If I can only pull through this year I shall be safe." On Friday, July 13, of his seventy-sixth year, Arnold Schoenberg stayed in bed—sick, anxious and depressed. In a letter to Schoenberg's sister Ottilie, dated 4 August 1951, his wife, Gertrud, reported "About a quarter to twelve I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over. Then the doctor called me. Arnold's throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end"