List of Famous people who died in 1952

Richard Johansson was a Swedish figure skater. He won the silver medal in the men's singles competition at the 1908 London Olympics. He was part of the Swedish medal sweep there. He also skated in pairs with Gertrud Ström and won the bronze at the 1909 World Championships.

Otto Szász was a Hungarian mathematician who worked on real analysis, in particular on Fourier series. He proved the Müntz–Szász theorem and introduced the Szász–Mirakyan operator. The Hungarian Mathematical and Physical Society awarded him the Julius König prize in 1939.

Anne Tracy Morgan was an American philanthropist who provided relief efforts in aid to France during and after World War I and World War II. Morgan was educated privately, traveled frequently and grew up amongst the wealth her father, banker J. P. Morgan, had amassed. She was awarded a medal from the National Institute of Social Science in 1915, the same year she published the story The American Girl. In 1932 she became the first American woman appointed a commander of the French Legion of Honor.

John Paterson McGowan was a pioneering Hollywood actor and director and occasionally a screenwriter and producer. McGowan remains the only Australian to have been made a life member of the Screen Directors Guild.

Sveinn Björnsson was the first President of the Republic of Iceland (1944–1952).

Mehmed Esad Pasha, known as Mehmet Esat Bülkat after the 1934 Surname Law, was an Ottoman general active during the First Balkan War, where he led the Yanya Corps, and in World War I, where he was the senior Ottoman commander in the Dardanelles Campaign.

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington was an English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, and a pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian, in 1932 for their work on the functions of neurons. Prior to the work of Sherrington and Adrian, it was widely accepted that reflexes occurred as isolated activity within a reflex arc. Sherrington received the prize for showing that reflexes require integrated activation and demonstrated reciprocal innervation of muscles. Through his seminal 1906 publication, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, he had effectively laid to rest the theory that the nervous system, including the brain, can be understood as a single interlinking network. His alternative explanation of synaptic communication between neurons helped shape our understanding of the central nervous system.

Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg was a Finnish jurist and academic, which was one of the most important pioneers of republicanism in the country. He was the first President of Finland (1919–1925) and a liberal nationalist.