List of Famous people who died in 1956

Victor William (Peter) Watson was a wealthy English art collector and benefactor. He funded the literary magazine, Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly.

Sir Pierce Thomas Lacy, 1st Baronet was an English stockbroker.

Grigory Abramovich Shajn was a Soviet/Russian astronomer. In modern English transliteration, his surname would be given as Shayn, but his astronomical discoveries are credited under the name G. Shajn. Nonetheless, his last name is sometimes given as Schayn.

Preston Thomas Tucker was an American automobile entrepreneur.

Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev was a Soviet architect, and a leading practitioner of Stalinist architecture.

Marcel Griaule was a French author and anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France. He worked together with Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch on African subjects. His publications number over 170 books and articles for scholarly journals.

Sir Francis Simon, was a German and later British physical chemist and physicist who devised the gaseous diffusion method, and confirmed its feasibility, of separating the isotope Uranium-235 and thus made a major contribution to the creation of the atomic bomb.

Elmer Drew Merrill was an American botanist and taxonomist. He spent more than twenty years in the Philippines where he became a recognized authority on the flora of the Asia-Pacific region. Through the course of his career he authored nearly 500 publications, described approximately 3,000 new plant species, and amassed over one million herbarium specimens. In addition to his scientific work he was an accomplished administrator, college dean, university professor and editor of scientific journals.

Emmanouil Tsouderos was a political and financial figure of Greece. During World War II he served as Prime Minister of Greece from 1941 to 1944, for all but one week of that tenure as head of the Greek government in exile.