List of Famous people who died at 81

Khalil Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, was an Iranian politician and diplomat. Bakhtiary was Iran's Ambassador to West Germany from 1952 to 1961. He was the father of Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, the second wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran.

Vernon Willard Hughes was an American physicist specializing in research of subatomic particles. Hughes was born in Kankakee, Illinois. During World War II, he worked at the M.I.T. Radiation Lab. He earned his PhD under I. I. Rabi at Columbia University in 1950. Hughes was notable for his research of muons which showed the existence of previously undetected matter. He was also noted for research that showed that protons have gluons and quarks. Hughes was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Sterling Professor at Yale University, and a recipient of Rumford Prize, and a recipient of Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic Physics and the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics, both from the American Physical Society.

Kalman Kahana was a long-serving Israeli politician and journalist, and a signatory of the Israeli declaration of independence. He was the brother of Yitzhak Kahan, former President of the Supreme Court of Israel.

William Aaron Nierenberg was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 through 1986. He was a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984.

Masayoshi Kori Hisataka was the founder of Shorinjiryu Kenkokan Karate.

Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas.