List of Famous people who died at 72

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, science essayist, and pioneer in computing science. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum (Amsterdam) from 1952 to 1962. A university professor for much of his life, Dijkstra held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until his retirement in 1999. He was a professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology (1962–1984) and a research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation (1973–1984). In 1972, he became the first non-American, non-British, and continental European winner of the Turing Award.

Ralph E. Griswold was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation. His language credits include the string processing language SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon.

Manuel de Pedrolo i Molina was an author of novels, short stories, poetry and plays. He's mostly known for his sci-fi novel Mecanoscrit del segon origen.

Sergei Nikolaevich Vernov was a Russian-Soviet physicist who pioneered the study of primary cosmic rays. He examined cosmic rays initially with high altitude balloons, then with ground observatories and then in space and found patterns in the distribution of ions in latitudinal belts and radiation belts at varying altitudes. Although he was the first to identify these radiation belts, they are better known in the Anglophone scientific world through the work of James van Allen and termed as Van Allen Radiation Belts.

Gil Juco Puyat Sr. was a Filipino statesman and businessman who served as a Senator of the Philippines from 1951 until 1972 when Marcos shut congress down and declared Martial Law, and as Senate President from 1967 to 1972.