List of Famous people who born in 1940

David Seltzer is an American screenwriter, producer and director, perhaps best known for writing the screenplays for The Omen (1976) and Bird on a Wire (1990). As writer-director, Seltzer's credits include the 1986 teen tragi-comedy Lucas starring Corey Haim, Charlie Sheen and Winona Ryder, the 1988 comedy Punchline starring Sally Field and Tom Hanks, and 1992's Shining Through starring Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas.

Valentyn Kostyantynovych Symonenko is a Ukrainian politician and former Soviet Communist Party functionary. Between 1996 and 2011 he was chairman of the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine.

Edward Christian Prescott is an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he is the 19th most widely cited economist in the world today. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed as an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia.

Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University. Since the 1960s, Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, modal logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape recordings and privately circulated manuscripts.