List of Famous people who born in 1912

Dinmukhamed Akhmetuly "Dimash" Kunaev was a Kazakh Soviet communist politician who served as the First Secretary of the Commmunist Party of Kazakhstan.

Viola Clara Smith was an American drummer best known for her work in orchestras, swing bands, and popular music from the 1920s until 1975. She was one of the first professional female drummers. She played five times on The Ed Sullivan Show, as well as in two films and the Broadway musical Cabaret.

Kentaro Yano was a mathematician working on differential geometry who introduced the Bochner–Yano theorem.

Senkichi Taniguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter.

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".

Winthrop Rockefeller was an American politician and philanthropist. Rockefeller was a son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. As an entrepreneur in Arkansas, he financed many local projects, including a number of new medical clinics in poorer areas, before being elected state governor in 1966, as the first Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction. Despite accusations of lacking insight into the concerns of low-income voters, Rockefeller was re-elected in 1968, and went on to complete the controversial integration of Arkansas schools.

Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian writer who published 12 novels, three short-story collections, and eight plays, from 1935 to 1987.

Boris Alexandrovich Pokrovsky was a Russian opera director, best known as the stage director of the Bolshoi Theatre between 1943 and 1982.

Thomas Phillip "Tip" O'Neill Jr. was an American politician who served as the 47th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987, representing northern Boston, Massachusetts, as a Democrat from 1953 to 1987. The only Speaker to serve for five complete consecutive Congresses, he is the third longest-serving Speaker in American history after Sam Rayburn and Henry Clay in terms of total tenure and longest-serving in terms of continuous tenure.

Klaus Gysi was a journalist and publisher and a member of the French Resistance against the Nazis. After World War II, he became a politician in the German Democratic Republic, serving in the government as Minister of Culture from 1966 to 1973, and from 1979 to 1988, as the State Secretary for Church Affairs. He was a member of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and after German Reunification, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). His son is the German politician Gregor Gysi.