List of Famous people who born in 1942

Anna A. Georges Eshoo is the U.S. Representative from California's 18th congressional district, serving since 1993. She is a member of the Democratic Party. The district, numbered as the 14th district from 1993 to 2013 is based in Silicon Valley, including the cities of Redwood City, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Palo Alto, as well as part of San Jose. She is the only Assyrian American in Congress, and is also one of only two congresswomen of Armenian descent, with Jackie Speier being the other. She is Assyrian paternally and Armenian maternally.

Mukhtar Shakhanov is a prominent Kazakh writer, lawmaker, and the Kazakh ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. He is also a Member of Parliament for Majilis, as well as Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Zhalyn.

Henri Jacques William Pescarolo is a former racing driver from France. He competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans a record 33 times, winning on four occasions, and won a number of other major sports car events including the 24 Hours of Daytona. He also participated in 64 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix, achieving one podium and 12 championship points. Pescarolo also drove in the Dakar Rally in the 1990s, before retiring from racing at the age of 57. In 2000 he set up his eponymous racing team, Pescarolo Sport, which competed in Le Mans until 2013. He wore a distinctive green helmet, and wears a full-face beard that partially covers burns suffered in a crash.

Otto Cornelis Kaligis, better known as O.C. Kaligis, is an Indonesian lawyer serving a 10-year jail sentence for bribing judges.

John Winslow Irving is an American-Canadian novelist and screenwriter.

Jacques Dubochet is a retired Swiss biophysicist. He is a former researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock is a British politician. As a member of the Labour Party, he served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until 1995, first for Bedwellty and then for Islwyn. He was the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1983 until 1992, and Vice-President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004.

Mónica Randall is a Spanish film actress.

Sir James Fraser Stoddart is a British chemist who is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches. His group has even applied these structures in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). His efforts have been recognized by numerous awards including the 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 2016 for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

Alberto Santofimio Botero is a Colombian politician, a member of the Colombian Liberal Party. He has been Minister of Justice, a two-time presidential candidate and a Senator. He was considered to be a sure bet for president in 1982, but he decided to let his boss, Alfonso López Michelsen who had been President from 1974 to 1978, run for reelection. In the 1990s, Santofimio was involved in the campaign Process 8000 as head of the Liberal Party in Tolima Department as that party's office was accused of receiving money from companies part of an investigation in order to support the campaign for the presidency of Colombia for Ernesto Samper.