List of Famous people who died in 1996

Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."

Edith Elura Tilton Penrose was an American-born British economist whose best known work is The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, which describes the ways which firms grow and how fast they do. Writing in The Independent, the economist Sir Alec Cairncross stated that the book brought Dr. Penrose "instant recognition as a creative thinker, and its importance to the analysis of the job of management has been increasingly realized".

Colonel Robert Franklyn "Bob" Overmyer was an American test pilot, naval aviator, aeronautical engineer, physicist, United States Marine Corps officer and USAF/NASA astronaut. Overmyer was selected by the Air Force as an astronaut for its Manned Orbiting Laboratory in 1966. Upon cancellation of this program in 1969, he became a NASA astronaut and served support crew duties for the Apollo program, Skylab program and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. In 1976, he was assigned to the Space Shuttle program and flew as pilot on STS-5 in 1982 and as commander on STS-51-B in 1985. He was selected as a lead investigator into the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and retired from NASA in 1986. Ten years later, Overmyer died in Duluth, Minnesota while testing the Cirrus VK-30 composite homebuilt aircraft.

Elrey Borge Jeppesen was an American aviation pioneer noted for his contributions in the field of air navigation. He created manuals and charts that enabled pilots to fly much more safely. In 1934, he founded the Jeppesen company to sell what he had developed; it is now a subsidiary of Boeing.

Sir George Lowthian Trevelyan, 4th Baronet was a British educational pioneer and a founding father of the New Age movement. In 1942, after listening to a lecture by Dr Walter Stein, a student of Rudolf Steiner, he transitioned from being agnostic to a new age spiritual thinker, and even studied anthroposophy in the coming years. He first became a History teacher at Gordonstoun School, pioneering radical education methods. After World War II, in 1948, he became the Warden at Attingham Park, a pioneering adult education college in Shropshire, from where he retired in 1971 to found the Wrekin Trust, an educational charity. He was subsequently associated with the Soil Association, the Findhorn Foundation, the Teilhard de Chardin Society and the Essene Network. In the last 15 years of his life he was the focus of many lecture tours and meetings. He also wrote numerous books, including A Vision of the Aquarian Age (1977), Operation Redemption (1981), Summons to a High Crusade (1985) and finally Exploration into God (1991). He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1982 for "educating the adult spirit to a new non-materialistic vision of human nature."

August Maus was a German U-boat commander in World War II and recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross of Nazi Germany. Prior to taking command of U-185, he served as an officer on U-68 under the command of Captain Karl-Friedrich Merten. Maus was taken prisoner following the sinking of U-185 and in 1944 participated in an escape attempt from the prisoner-of-war camp Papago Park in the United States.

Francis Factor, also known as Max Factor Jr., was an American businessman who was president of the Max Factor Cosmetics empire.

David Matthew Kennedy was an American politician and businessman. He served as the 60th U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and later as the 8th U.S. Ambassador to NATO, both under U.S. President Richard Nixon. He was Chief Executive and Chairman of the Board of Continental Illinois during the 1950s and 1960s.