List of Famous people who died in 1976

George Robert Groves was a film sound pioneer who played a significant role in developing the technology that brought sound to the silent screen. He is also credited as being Hollywood's first ‘sound man’; he was the recording engineer on the seminal Al Jolson picture, The Jazz Singer (1927), as well as many other early talkies. In a career with Warner Brothers that spanned 46 years, he rose to become their Director of Sound and won two Academy Awards.

Walter Hans Schottky was a German physicist who played a major early role in developing the theory of electron and ion emission phenomena, invented the screen-grid vacuum tube in 1915 while working at Siemens, co-invented the ribbon microphone and ribbon loudspeaker along with Dr. Erwin Gerlach in 1924 and later made many significant contributions in the areas of semiconductor devices, technical physics and technology.

Delbert Ray Fulkerson was an American mathematician who co-developed the Ford–Fulkerson algorithm, one of the most well-known algorithms to solve the maximum flow problem in networks.

William Zeckendorf Sr. was a prominent American real estate developer. Through his development company Webb and Knapp — for which he began working in 1938 and which he purchased in 1949 — he developed a significant portion of the New York City urban landscape. Architects I. M. Pei and Le Corbusier designed structures for Zeckendorf's development projects.

Sir Basil Urwin Spence, was a Scottish architect, most notably associated with Coventry Cathedral in England and the Beehive in New Zealand, but also responsible for numerous other buildings in the Modernist/Brutalist style.

Fritz Winter was a German painter of the postwar period best known for his abstract works in the Art Informel style.

Hans Rothfels was a nationalist conservative German historian. He supported an idea of authoritarian German state, dominance of Germany over Europe and was hostile to Germany's eastern neighbours. After his applications for honorary Aryan status were rejected, due to his Jewish ancestry and increased persecution of Jewish people by Nazis, he was forced to emigrate to the United Kingdom and later to the United States during the Second World War, after which he became opposed to the Nazi regime. Rothfels returned to West Germany after 1945 where he continued to influence history teaching and became an influential figure among West German scholars.

Emil Hans Willi Hennig was a German biologist who is considered the founder of phylogenetic systematics, also known as cladistics. In 1945 as a prisoner of war, Hennig began work on his theory of cladistics, which he published in German in 1950, with a substantially revised English translation published in 1966. With his works on evolution and systematics he revolutionised the view of the natural order of beings. As a taxonomist, he specialised in dipterans.