List of Famous people who died in 1940

Édouard Michelin was a French industrialist. He was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Édouard and his elder brother André served as co-directors of the Michelin company.

Émile Argand was a Swiss geologist.

Nicolás Rodríguez Carrasco was a Mexican general and fascist.

Oliver Gatty was a British chemist and psychical researcher.

Farnsworth Wright was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday, editing 179 issues from November 1924–March 1940. Jack Williamson called Wright "the first great fantasy editor".

Abel Rey was a French philosopher and historian of science.

Adam Zamenhof was a Polish physician known for his work on ophthalmology and the son of L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto. Before the Holocaust, Zamenhof had invented a device to check blind spots in the field of vision. During World War II, 6 September 1939, he was head of the Starozakonnych Hospital in Warsaw, and its director. On 1 October 1939 Zamenhof was arrested and sent to the camp in Palmiry, where he was murdered by the Nazis.

Tjerk Bottema was a Dutch painter. At age 14 he was sent Rijkskweekschool in Maastricht where he studied drawing. Later Bottema studies are the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where art-nouveau had just come to hold sway. During this time Bottema also started drawing advertisements, an activity that would later make him famous. In 1909 he has his first major success with the painting “Maaiers”, one year later he wins the prestigious Prix de Rome. During World War I he visited the Western Front to make an illustrated report for De Amsterdammer. After the war he settles in Paris, he finds a job writing travel reports for De Notenkraker. When in 1940 the German army approaches Paris Bottema decides to leave France, dying when the ship he was travelling on was traveling on was sunk by a German U-boat.

Albert Young was an American welterweight boxer who competed in the early twentieth century. He won a gold medal in boxing at the 1904 Summer Olympics.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov was a Russian biologist and a pioneer of modern genetics. Among his students were Nikolay Timofeeff-Ressovsky, Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson, A.S. Serebrovsky, and Nikolay Dubinin. Along with his students, he demonstrated the fine structure of genes, and examined the structure of the cell and pioneered the idea of a cytoskeleton. His career was cut short in Stalinist Russia due to the entanglement of Marxist ideology and interpretations that genetics was a science that supported racism, fascism and eugenics. He died unexpectedly following government persecution and was most likely executed.