List of Famous people who died in 1979

Raissa Samojlovna Calza was a Ukrainian dancer who became a prominent classical archaeologist of Roman portraiture. When she was young, she fled to Italy and France following the Russian revolution.

Ida Pauline Rolf was a biochemist and the creator of Structural Integration or "Rolfing", a pseudoscientific alternative medicine practice.

Otto Robert Frisch FRS was an Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Lise Meitner he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission and first experimentally detected the fission by-products. Later, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls he designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940.

Hubert Jozef ("Hub") van Doorne was the founder of Van Doorne's Aanhangwagenfabriek and of Van Doorne's Automobielfabriek known as DAF, together with his brother Willem (Wim) van Doorne.

Lieutenant General Nader Jahanbani was an Iranian general, distinguished fighter pilot of Imperial Iranian Air Force (IIAF) and the deputy chief of the IIAF under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Despite being executed in 1979 by Islamic Revolutionaries, he is widely lauded as the "father of the Iranian Air Force" along with general Mohammad Khatami and general Amir Hossein Rabii, for modernizing the Air Force to become a potent and powerful force whose advanced equipment and training they acquired for Iran, such as the F-14 Tomcat, would save Iran's crucial infrastructure during the Iran–Iraq War. He was the Leader of the Golden Crown, the first and national aerobatics display Iranian team. He is nicknamed the "blue eyed general of Iran". By many accounts, he is considered one of the best and most capable pilots of its time.