List of Famous people who died in 1942

William Gibson, 2nd Baron Ashbourne was born at 20 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin to Edward Gibson, 1st Baron Ashbourne and Frances Maria Adelaide Colles.

William Graham Nicholson, PC, JP was a British Liberal Unionist and later Conservative Party politician.

William Hamilton was an American film editor whose career spanned three decades. His credits include Cimarron (1931), Morning Glory (1933), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Stage Door (1937), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Suspicion (1941).

William Ralph Martin-Leake was an English rugby union forward who played club rugby for Cambridge University and Harlequins and international rugby for England. In 1890 Leake became one of the original members of the Barbarians.

Zygmunt Zalcwasser was a Polish mathematician from the Warsaw School of Mathematics in the period between the World Wars collaborating especially in the fields of logic, set theory, general topology and real analysis. Zalcwasser, who worked on the Fourier series, introduced the Zalcwasser rank [Za] measuring the uniform convergence of sequences of continuous functions on the unit interval. Zalcwasser received his Ph.D. at the Warsaw University in 1928. He served as professor at the Wolna Wszechnica Polska in 1933–34 and after the invasion of Poland in 1939 lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. He died in the gas chambers of the Treblinka extermination camp in 1943 during the Holocaust in Poland.

Barney McGill was an American cinematographer who was nominated at the 4th Academy Awards for Best Cinematography for the film Svengali. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1890. He was the cinematographer for more than 90 films from 1919 to 1941.

Bernard Natan was a Franco-Romanian film entrepreneur, director and actor of the 1920s and 1930s. He was once said by historians to be one of the earliest pornographic film directors and pornographic film actors, although there is now considerable doubt about this. Natan certainly worked in mainstream cinema from his youngest days, working his way up from projectionist and chemist to cinematographer and producer. He eventually acquired the giant French motion picture studio Pathé in 1929. Pathé collapsed in 1935, and Natan was convicted of fraud. However, he laid the foundation for the modern film industry in France and helped revolutionize film technology around the world. Natan died after being transported to Auschwitz concentration camp.

Allen Bert Christman, known professionally as Bert Christman, was an American cartoonist and naval aviator. He is best known as artist of the newspaper comic strip Scorchy Smith, about a pilot-adventurer in the inter-war years. He was also credited with co-creating the original, Wesley Dodds version of the DC Comics character the Sandman.

Heinrich Gomperz was an Austrian philosopher.

William Henry Young FRS was an English mathematician. Young was educated at City of London School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He worked on measure theory, Fourier series, differential calculus, amongst other fields, and made contributions to the study of functions of several complex variables. He was the husband of Grace Chisholm Young, with whom he authored and co-authored 214 papers and 4 books. Two of their children became professional mathematicians. Young's Theorem was named after him.