List of Famous people who died in 1972

Emilia Gubitosi was an Italian pianist and composer.

Otto Griebel was a German painter. In 1933 he was arrested by the Gestapo and his paintings were branded as degenerate art. His painting "Child at a Table" was one of the artworks found in the 2012 Munich artworks discovery.

Vincenzo Talarico, was an Italian screenwriter and film actor. He wrote for 27 films between 1940 and 1966. He also appeared in 15 films between 1946 and 1964. He was born in Acri, Italy and died in Fiuggi, Italy.

Frank Hyneman Knight was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School. Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century. Paul Samuelson named Knight as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.

Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofé, known as Ferde Grofé was an American composer, arranger, pianist and instrumentalist. He is best known for his 1931 five-movement tone poem, Grand Canyon Suite.

Harry Joe Brown was an American film producer, and earlier a theatre and film director.

George Elmer Forsythe was the founder and head of Stanford University's Computer Science Department. George came to Stanford in the Mathematics Department in 1959, and served as professor and chairman of the Computer Science department from 1965 until his death. Forsythe served as the president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and also co-authored four books on computer science and a fifth on meteorology, and edited more than 75 other books on computer science.