List of Famous people who died at 71

Carlos Oviedo Cavada, O. de M. was a Chilean Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Santiago de Chile from 1990 to 1998, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1994.

Charles Thomas Kowal was an American astronomer known for his observations and discoveries in the Solar System. As a staff astronomer at Caltech's Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories between 1961 and 1984, he found the first of a new class of Solar System objects, the centaurs, discovered two moons of the planet Jupiter, and discovered or co-discovered a number of asteroids, comets and supernovae. He was awarded the James Craig Watson Medal for his contributions to astronomy in 1979.

Terry Southern was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style. Part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village, Southern was also at the center of Swinging London in the 1960s and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. He briefly wrote for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.

Elizabeth Leonard Scott was an American mathematician specializing in statistics.

Fathi Arafat, born in Cairo, was a Palestinian physician and a founder and long-term chairman of the Palestine Red Crescent Society. He studied medicine at Cairo University from 1950 until 1957 and thereafter practiced as a pediatrician in Cairo, Kuwait and Jordan. He was a younger brother of Palestinian president Yasser Arafat.