List of Famous people who died at 78

William Thomas Molloy was a Canadian lawyer, treaty negotiator, and Chancellor of the University of Saskatchewan. He was the 22nd Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, the viceregal representative of Queen Elizabeth II of Canada in the Province of Saskatchewan.

Friedemann Layer was an Austrian conductor. He was assistant to Herbert von Karajan in Ulm and to Karl Böhm. In 1989, he conducted a film version of Der Schauspieldirektor, with Zdzisława Donat and Christian Boesch in the cast.

John Hales Whitney, Sr. was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation.

Noel Ignatiev was an American author and historian. He was best known for his work on race and social class and for his call to abolish "whiteness". Ignatiev was the co-founder of the New Abolitionist Society and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor, which promoted the idea that "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". He also wrote a book on antebellum Northern xenophobia against Irish immigrants, How the Irish Became White.

François Georges René Bruhat was a French mathematician who worked on algebraic groups. The Bruhat order of a Weyl group, the Bruhat decomposition, and the Schwartz–Bruhat functions are named after him.