List of Famous people who died at 72

Victor Hasselblad was a Swedish inventor and photographer, known for inventing the Hasselblad 6x6 cm medium format camera.

Dave King was an English comedian, actor and vocalist of popular songs. He is remembered for screen roles such as the corrupt policeman 'Parky' in the British gangster film The Long Good Friday (1980) and Clifford Duckworth in the soap opera Coronation Street.

Anatoly Ivanovich Larkin was a Russian theoretical physicist, universally recognised as a leader in theory of condensed matter, and who was also a celebrated teacher of several generations of theorists.

William Bruce Hardwick was a right-handed ten-pin bowler and member of the Professional Bowlers Association.

Walter Ernst Fricke was a distinguished German professor of theoretical astronomy at the University of Heidelberg. He was a mathematician and cryptanalyst during World War II at the Wehrmacht signals intelligence agency, Inspectorate 7/VI from 1941 to 1942 (which would later become the General der Nachrichtenaufklärung. In 1942 he was transferred to the OKW/Chi Section IIb. His specialty was the production of codes and ciphers, and the security studies of Army systems. After the war he was director of the Astronomical Calculation Institute in Heidelberg, Germany.

William Rose was an American screenwriter of British and Hollywood films.

Abla al-Kahlawi was an Egyptian scholar and teacher of Islamic jurisprudence, as well as a religious leader, preacher, and television presenter. She taught at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, where she was the Dean of the Faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Women's College. She was listed on the inaugural edition of The 500 Most Influential Muslims for her work on religion and women, in 2009, and has published widely on women and Islamic jurisprudence. She preached in Egypt, in person and on television, as well as in Saudi Arabia, and notably preached every day for two years at the Masjid al-Ḥaram, Islam's most important mosque in Saudi Arabia, between 1987 and 1989.

John William Mauchly was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.

Seija Saara Maria Simola, married Franzén, was a Finnish singer. She began her career musical in the mid-1960s in the band Eero Seija & Kristian Trio, and her debut solo album was released in 1970: Seija Simola 1.