List of Famous people who died at 78

Somendra Nath Mitra, popularly known as Somen Mitra, was an Indian politician. He was a member of the 15th Lok Sabha, elected from the Diamond Harbour constituency in West Bengal state in 2009 as a Trinamool Congress candidate. He was a member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly from Sealdah from 1972 to 2006. He was the president of the state unit of the Indian National Congress. In July 2008, he left the Indian National Congress and formed a new party, named, Pragatisheel Indira Congress. In October 2009, the political party founded by him was officially merged with the All India Trinamool Congress. He rejoined his parent party Congress in January, 2014, before that he resigned from his MP post. He became the president of West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee for the second time on 22 September 2018 and served till his death on July 30th 2020.

Brigitte Kronauer was a German writer who lived in Hamburg. Her novels, written in the tradition of Jean Paul with artful writing and an ironic undertone, were awarded several prizes, including in 2005 the Georg Büchner Prize, in 2011 the Jean-Paul-Preis and in 2017 the Thomas Mann Prize.

Ilse Pagé was a German film and television actress.

Régine Deforges was a French author, editor, director, and playwright. Her book La Bicyclette bleue was the most popular book in France in 2000 and it was known by some to be offensive and to others for its plagiarism, neither of which was proved.

Bernhard Caesar Einstein was a Swiss-American engineer, the son of Hans Albert Einstein. Of the three known biological grandchildren of Albert Einstein, all sons of Hans, he was the only one to survive childhood.

Dieter Kunzelmann was a German left-wing terrorist. In the early 1960s he was a member of the Situationist-inspired artists' group Gruppe SPUR. He was one of the founders of Kommune 1 in 1967. At the end of the 1960s he was one of the leaders of the Tupamaros West-Berlin, which carried out bombings and arsons. He was arrested in July 1970 and served five years in prison for those activities. From 1983 to 1985 he served in the Berlin state parliament as a member of the Alternative List. In 1997 he was sentenced to a year in prison for throwing an egg at the mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen. He went into hiding for two years, reappearing to serve his sentence in 1999.

Maurice Ward was an English inventor best known for his invention of Starlite, a thermal shielding material. He was a former hairdresser from Hartlepool, County Durham, England. Ward believed he should not sell his material directly or allow unsupervised research due to the potential for reverse engineering, and he maintained that he should keep 51% ownership of the formula for Starlite because he valued the material to be worth billions; this is believed to have stunted its commercial success. Starlite is considered by many to be a lost invention, a technology which might have revolutionised the world of aerospace and materials science. Thermashield, LLC claims to have purchased the secret formula and all rights from Maurice's widow Eileen in 2013.

Hilda Murrell was a British rose grower, naturalist, diarist and campaigner against nuclear power and nuclear weapons. She was abducted and found murdered five miles from her home in Shropshire. Despite a conviction based on DNA and fingerprint evidence and a confession, the case remains controversial and subject to conspiracy theories.

Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was an American mathematician known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory. He was a professor emeritus of mathematics and EECS at the University of California, Berkeley.

Donald Lee Haskins, nicknamed "The Bear", was an American basketball player and coach. He played college basketball for three years under coach Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M. He was the head coach at Texas Western College from 1961 to 1999. His greatest triumph occurred in 1966, when his team won the NCAA Tournament over the Wildcats of the University of Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp. The watershed game initiated the end of racial segregation in college basketball.