List of Famous people who died at 79

Mar Dinkha IV, born Dinkha Khanania, was the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. He was born in the village of Darbandokeh (Derbendoki), Iraq and led the Church in exile in Chicago for most of his life.

Pancho Haralanov Vladigerov was a Bulgarian composer, pedagogue, and pianist.

Simms Taback was an American writer, graphic artist, and illustrator of more than 35 books. He won the 2000 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing Joseph Had a Little Overcoat, and was a runner-up in 1998 for There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.

Edwin Evariste Moise was an American mathematician and mathematics education reformer. After his retirement from mathematics he became a literary critic of 19th-century English poetry and had several notes published in that field.

Aleksandar Tišma was a Serbian novelist.

Manuel Cardona Castro was a physicist. According to the ISI Citations web database, Cardona was one of the eight most cited physicists since 1970. He specialized in solid state physics.

Edward Geary Lansdale was a United States Air Force officer until retiring in 1963 as a major general before continuing his work with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lansdale was a pioneer in clandestine operations and psychological warfare. In the early 1950s, Lansdale played a significant role in suppressing the Huk insurgency in the Philippines. In 1954, he moved to Saigon and started the Saigon Military Mission, a covert intelligence operation which was created to sow dissension in North Vietnam. Lansdale believed the United States could win guerrilla wars by studying the enemy's psychology, an approach that won the approval of the presidential administrations of both Kennedy and Johnson.