List of Famous people who died at 72

Sir William Vallance Douglas Hodge was a British mathematician, specifically a geometer.

Marvin Worth was an American film producer, screenwriter and actor. His efforts to bring the biography of Malcolm X to the big screen started in 1967, when he purchased the rights to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and eventually led to the production of the 1972 documentary, for which he received an Oscar nomination. Later on, he would produce Malcolm X, with director Spike Lee. He was nominated for an Oscar for producing Lenny in 1974.

Gilbert John Mellé was an American artist, jazz musician and film composer.

Eugene Rabinowitch (1901–1973) was a Russian-born American biophysicist who is known for his work in photosynthesis and nuclear energy. He was a co-author of the Franck Report and a co-founder in 1945 of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a global security and public policy magazine, which he edited until his death.

Martha Sleeper was a film actress of the 1920s–1930s and, later, a Broadway stage actress. She studied dancing for five years with Russian ballet master, Louis H. Chalif, at his New York dancing studio. Her first public exhibitions were at Carnegie Hall at his class exhibitions.

Yuri Dmitriyevich Maslyukov was a Russian politician who was in charge of the Gosplan for three years preceding the demise of the Soviet Union and first deputy prime minister in 1998–1999.

Victor Lvovich Zaslavsky was a professor of political sociology who taught at institutions such as LUISS, the Leningrad State University, Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Canada, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere during a long academic career. He developed trenchant analyses of political and social aspects of the Soviet Union, prior to and following its collapse. Born in Leningrad, Zaslavsky was a naturalized citizen of Canada. He was a member of the board of the political journal TELOS for several decades. His major work prior to his death in 2009 was Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn, which received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought from the Heinrich Boell Foundation. Zaslavsky's articles published in journals throughout the later years of the 20th century gained him a following in the United States and across continental Europe.