List of Famous people who died at 73

(Stanley) Keith Runcorn was a British physicist whose paleomagnetic reconstruction of the relative motions of Europe and America revived the theory of continental drift and was a major contribution to plate tectonics.

Iosif Davidovich Amusin was a Soviet historian, orientalist, hebraist and papyrologyst, was specialist in the history of the Ancient Near East and Qumran studies.

Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary Continental philosophy and author of 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt.