List of Famous people who died at 78

Evan Hunter, born Salvatore Albert Lombino,(October 15, 1926 – July 6, 2005) was an American author and screenwriter best known for his 87th Precinct novels, written under his Ed McBain pen name, and the novel upon which the film Blackboard Jungle was based.

Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project and in the creation of the nuclear bomb. Robert Oppenheimer assembled a team at the Los Alamos Laboratory to work on plutonium gun design Thin Man, that included senior engineer Edwin McMillan and senior physicists Charles Critchfield and Joseph Hirschfelder. Hirschfelder had been working on internal ballistics. Oppenheimer led the design effort himself until June 1943, when Navy Captain William Sterling Parsons arrived took over the Ordnance and Engineering Division and direct management of the "Thin Man" project. Hirschfelder was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a group leader in theoretical physics and ordnance at the Los Alamos Atomic Bomb Laboratory, chief phenomenologist at the nuclear bomb tests at Bikini, the founder of the Theoretical Chemistry Institute and the Homer Adkins professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. Hirschfelder was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the National Medal of Science from President Gerald Ford “for his fundamental contributions to atomic and molecular quantum mechanics, the theory of the rates of chemical reactions, and the structure and properties of gases and liquids”.

Ric Waite was an American cinematographer whose numerous film and television credits included Red Dawn, Footloose, 48 Hrs., and The Long Riders. Waite received four Emmy nominations during his career. He won his only Emmy for his work on the 1976 television miniseries Captains and the Kings.

James Edmund Neil Paterson was a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. He won the 1959 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Room at the Top. Before his success as a writer, he worked in journalism and had a brief career as an amateur footballer, playing for Buckie Thistle, Leith Athletic and Dundee United in the Scottish Football League.