List of Famous people who died in 1970

Ruth Law Oliver was a pioneer American aviator during the 1910s.

Percy Lebaron Spencer was an American physicist and inventor. He became known as the inventor of the microwave oven.

Vicente do Rego Monteiro, born in Recife, was a Brazilian painter, sculptor, and poet, born to a rich family. He was part of the Semana de Arte Moderna exhibition and helped form the later Brazilian Modernism.

Marietta Blau was an Austrian physicist.

Ernst May was a German architect and city planner.

Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Alliant International University, Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Louise Pauline Mainguené, known as Sylvie, was a French actress.

Xie Xuehong was a Taiwanese politician. A women's rights activist, she cofounded the Taiwanese Communist Party. Persecuted by the Kuomintang, she escaped to China, where she became a member of the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League and the Communist Party of China.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a German composer. He is perhaps best known for his opera Die Soldaten, which is regarded as one of the most important German operas of the 20th century, after those of Berg. As a result of his individual style, it is hard to label his music as avant-garde, serial or postmodern. His music employs a wide range of methods including the twelve-tone row and musical quotation.

Nikolay Robertovich Erdman was a Soviet dramatist and screenwriter primarily remembered for his work with Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s. His plays, notably The Suicide (1928), form a link in Russian literary history between the satirical drama of Nikolai Gogol and the post-World War II Theatre of the Absurd.