List of Famous people who died at 79

Harold Vincent "Hal" Connolly was an American athlete and hammer thrower from Somerville, Massachusetts. He won a gold medal in the hammer throw at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Connolly became the first American to throw hammer more than 200 feet. He set his first of six world records just prior to the 1956 Olympics, and held the world record for nearly 10 years.

Johanna Braun was a German writer.

Otto Bayer was a German industrial chemist at IG Farben who was head of the research group that in 1937 discovered the polyaddition for the synthesis of polyurethanes out of poly-isocyanate and polyol.

Georg Schewe was an officer with the Kriegsmarine during World War II. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Schewe sailed with U-60 and U-105, sinking sixteen ships on ten patrols, for a total of 85.779 tons of Allied shipping of which 71,450 tons on one patrol alone. It was the second most successful patrol of World War II, second only to Günther Hessler's patrol on U-107.

Georg Maier was a German actor and theatre director.

Ralph Jose P. Burns was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.

Richard Angst was a Swiss cinematographer who worked on more than ninety films during his career, most of them in Germany. Angst emerged as a leading photographer of mountain films during the silent era. He often worked with the director Arnold Fanck, and accompanied him in 1937 for The New Earth his troubled 1937 co-production with Japan. While he worked on some Nazi propaganda films such as My Life for Ireland, many of the films he was employed on during the era were less political.