List of Famous people who died at 79

Heinrich Rohrer was a Swiss physicist who shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska. The Heinrich Rohrer Medal is presented triennially by the Surface Science Society of Japan with IBM Research – Zurich, Swiss Embassy in Japan, and Ms. Rohrer in his memory. The medal is not to be confused with the Heinrich Rohrer Award presented at the Nano Seoul 2020 conference.

Brigadier Sir Miles Garth Hunt-Davis, was a British Army officer who was also the Private Secretary to The Duke of Edinburgh from 1993 until 2010.

Bela Andreevna Rudenko was a Ukrainian and Russian opera singer, music teacher, and professor of the Moscow Conservatory. She was awarded the People's Artist of the USSR in 1960 and a Laureate of the USSR State Prize in 1971.

Luciano Martino was an Italian film producer, director and screenwriter.

Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutiérrez was a Bolivian-American educator known for teaching students calculus from 1974 to 1991 at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Escalante was the subject of the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, in which he is portrayed by Edward James Olmos.