List of Famous people who died in 1955

Sidney Herbert Buller-Fullerton-Elphinstone, 16th Lord Elphinstone and 2nd Baron Elphinstone, was a Scottish nobleman.

Ruggero Grieco was an Italian politician, antifascist, and member of the Italian Communist Party. He was born in Foggia, Apulia.

Carlo Somigliana was an Italian mathematician and a classical mathematical physicist, faithful member of the school of Enrico Betti and Eugenio Beltrami. He made important contributions to linear elasticity: the Somigliana integral equation, analogous to Green's formula in potential theory, and the Somigliana dislocations are named after him. Other fields he contribute to include seismic wave propagation, gravimetry and glaciology. One of his ancestors was Alessandro Volta: precisely, the great Como physicist was an ancestor of Carlo's mother, Teresa Volta.

Charles Herbert Shaw was an Australian journalist and novelist.

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the enzyme lysozyme and the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance which he named penicillin. He discovered lysozyme from his nasal discharge in 1922, and along with it a bacterium he named Micrococcus Lysodeikticus, later renamed Micrococcus luteus. His discovery of what is later named benzylpenicillin from the mould Penicillium rubens in 1928, is described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease." For this discovery he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

Tirukkannapuram Vijayaraghavan was an Indian mathematician from the Madras region. He worked with G. H. Hardy when he went to Oxford in mid-1920s on Pisot–Vijayaraghavan numbers. He was a fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences elected in the year 1934.