List of Famous people who died at 80

Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian and Soviet nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.

Lynd Kendall Ward was an American artist and novelist, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel. Strongly associated with his wood engravings, he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward was a son of Methodist minister and political organizer Harry F. Ward.

Erzsébet Nagy was a Hungarian writer and translator, and the only child of the former Prime Minister of Hungary, Imre Nagy, who was executed following the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Aldo van Eyck was an architect from the Netherlands. He was one of the most influential protagonists of the architectural movement Structuralism.