List of Famous people who died in 1979

Heinz Pollay was a German horse rider who competed in dressage from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Competing in two Summer Olympics, he won two golds and one bronze.

Carlos Garcia Camacho was a Guamanian politician and member of the Republican Party. He served as the last appointed Governor of Guam from 1969 to 1971 and the first elected Governor of Guam from 1971 to 1975. He was the father of Felix Camacho, a former senator in the Guam Legislature, who also served as Governor of Guam.

Anne Vondeling was a Dutch politician of the Labour Party (PvdA) and agronomist.

Winton C. Hoch, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer. He was earlier a lab technician who contributed to the development of Technicolor before becoming a cinematographer in 1936. His understanding of the color process quickly led to his being hailed as one of Hollywood's premier color cinematographers. Hoch never made a film in black and white.

Abul A'la Maududi was an Islamic scholar, Islamist ideologue, Muslim philosopher, jurist, historian, journalist, activist and scholar active in British India and later, following the partition, in Pakistan. Described by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as "the most systematic thinker of modern Islamic", his numerous works, which "covered a range of disciplines such as Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, law, philosophy and history", were written in Urdu, but then translated into English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Burmese, Malayalam and many other languages. He sought to revive Islam, and to propagate what he understood to be "true Islam". He believed that Islam was essential for politics and that it was necessary to institute sharia and preserve Islamic culture similar to the reign of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and abandon immorality, from what he viewed as the evils of secularism, nationalism and socialism, which he understood to be the influence of Western imperialism.