List of Famous people who died at 79

Hidesaburo Hanafusa was a Japanese virologist. He shared the 1982 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop for demonstrating how RNA tumor viruses cause cancer, and elucidating their role in combining, rescuing and maintaining oncogenes in the viral genome.

Luther Harris Evans was an American political scientist who served as the tenth Librarian of Congress and third Director-General of UNESCO.

Henry Nash Smith was a scholar of American culture and literature. He was co-founder of the academic discipline "American studies". He was also a noted Mark Twain scholar, and the curator of the Mark Twain Papers.

Hubert Deittert was a German politician and member of CDU in the Bundestag from 1994 until 2009. He was born in North Rhine-Westphalia, Rietberg.

Sir John Turton Randall, was an English physicist and biophysicist, credited with radical improvement of the cavity magnetron, an essential component of centimetric wavelength radar, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It is also the key component of microwave ovens.