List of Famous people who died in 1978

Loyal Griggs, A.S.C., was an American cinematographer.

Walter Richard Miles was an American psychologist and a president of the American Psychological Association (APA). He best known for his development of the two-story rat maze, his research on low dose alcohol, the development of red night vision goggles for aviation pilots, and the reduction of performance in aging individuals. However, the theme of his academic career was his fascination with apparatuses to measure behavior. C. James Goodwin (2003) noted that Miles "never became a leading figure in any particular area of research in psychology... but drifted from one area to another, with the direction of the drift determined often by the presence of a particular type of apparatus or an apparatus-related problem that intrigued him" (p. 58).

Leslie Fenton was an American actor and film director. He appeared in 62 films between 1923 and 1945.

Bruno Touschek was an Austrian physicist, a survivor of the Holocaust, and initiator of research on electron-positron colliders.

Jens August Schade was a Danish poet. His debut was the 1926 poetry collection den levende violin, "the living violin". He referred to himself in his poetry as "the bright poet". The themes of his poetry were often the interconnection between the erotic and the forces of the cosmos. In 1963 he received the grand prize of the Danish Academy. His 1928 work "Læren om staten" is part of the Danish Culture Canon.

Gregor Wentzel was a German physicist known for development of quantum mechanics. Wentzel, Hendrik Kramers, and Léon Brillouin developed the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation in 1926. In his early years, he contributed to X-ray spectroscopy, but then broadened out to make contributions to quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, and meson theory.