List of Famous people who died in 1959

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who is best known for coining the word genocide and initiating the Genocide Convention. Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 or 1944 from genos and -cide. His work inspired Jessie Bernard whose American Community Behavior contains one of the earliest sociological studies of genocide.

Charles Francis Laseron was an American-born Australian naturalist and malacologist.

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator, and occasional writer. Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism.

Blessed Nicholas Charnetsky was a member of the Redemptorists, a religious congregation in the Byzantine Rite of the Catholic Church; he is considered a martyr by the Church.

Paul Rivet was a French ethnologist; he founded the Musée de l'Homme in 1937. In his professional work, Rivet is known for his theory that South America was originally populated in part by migrants who sailed there from Australia and Melanesia. He married Mercedes Andrade Chiriboga, a woman born in Cuenca, Ecuador.

John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood was a noted chemist and physicist, holding faculty positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University.

Heinrich Ernst Karl Jordan was a German-British entomologist. He took a special interest in the taxonomy and classification of butterflies, beetles and fleas. Jordan was a founder of the International Congress of Entomology.

Felix Jacoby was a German classicist and philologist. He is best known among classicists for his highly important work Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, a collection of text fragments of ancient Greek historians.