List of Famous people who died at 81

Heinrich Adolph Louis Behnke was a German mathematician and rector at the University of Münster.

Carlos Valdés Galán, better known as Patato, was a Cuban conga player. In 1954, he emigrated from La Habana to New York City where he continued his prolific career as a sideman for several jazz and Latin music ensembles, and occasionally as a bandleader. He contributed to the development of the tunable conga drum which revolutionized the use of the instrument in the US. His experimental descarga albums recorded for Latin Percussion are considered the counterpart to the commercial salsa boom of the 1970s. Tito Puente once called him "the greatest conguero alive today".

William Smith Tillett was an American internist and microbiologist. He is best known for the discovery of C-reactive protein and the streptokinase. He was also a professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine.

Piero Taruffi, was a racing driver from Italy.

Per Vilhelm Rudolf "Preven" Svedberg was a welterweight Greco-Roman wrestler from Sweden. He won gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics and 1935 European Championships, finishing second in 1938. Between 1934 and 1944 he won ten national titles.