List of Famous people who died in 1998

Boris Borisovich Kadomtsev was a Russian plasma physicist who worked on controlled fusion problems. He developed a theory of transport phenomena in turbulent plasmas and a theory of the so-called anomalous behavior of plasmas in magnetic fields. In 1966, he discovered plasma instability with trapped particles.

Thomas Bradley was an American politician and police officer who served as the 38th Mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993. He was the first and thus far only African American mayor of Los Angeles, and his 20 years in office mark the longest tenure by any mayor in the city's history. His election as mayor in 1973 made him the second African-American mayor of a major U.S. city. Bradley retired in 1993, after his approval ratings began dropping subsequent to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.

George Moir Christie, better known as Kitch Christie, was a South African rugby union coach best known for coaching the country's national team, the Springboks, to victory at the 1995 Rugby World Cup. He remained unbeaten during his tenure as Springbok rugby coach between 1994 and 1996, including leading the team to a then record 14 consecutive victories. In 2011, he was inducted posthumously into the IRB Hall of Fame, later subsumed into the World Rugby Hall of Fame.

Kim Ki-young was a South Korean film director, known for his intensely psychosexual and melodramatic horror films, often focusing on the psychology of their female characters. Kim was born in Seoul during the colonial period, raised in Pyongyang, where he became interested in theater and cinema. In Korea after the end of World War II, he studied dentistry while becoming involved in the theater. During the Korean War, he made propaganda films for the United States Information Service. In 1955, he used discarded movie equipments to produce his first two films. With the success of these two films Kim formed his own production company and produced popular melodramas for the rest of the decade.

Frithjof Schuon was a Swiss metaphysician and spiritual master of German descent, belonging to the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, the religious phenomenon, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages. He was also a painter and a poet.

Hugh Coveney was an Irish Fine Gael politician who served as Minister of State at the Department of Finance from 1996 to 1997, Minister for the Marine and Minister for Defence from 1994 to 1995 and Lord Mayor of Cork from 1982 to 1983. He served as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Cork South-Central constituency from 1981 to 1982, 1982 to 1987 and 1994 to 1998.

Drexel Jerome Lewis Bixby was an American short story writer and scriptwriter. He wrote the 1953 story "It's a Good Life" which was the basis for a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone and which was included in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). He also wrote four episodes for the Star Trek series: "Mirror, Mirror", "Day of the Dove", "Requiem for Methuselah", and "By Any Other Name". With Otto Klement, he co-wrote the story upon which the science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage (1966), television series, and novel by Isaac Asimov were based. Bixby's final produced or published work so far was the screenplay for the 2007 science fiction film The Man from Earth.

Ewell Doak Walker II was an American football player. He played college football as a halfback at Southern Methodist University (SMU), where he won the Heisman Trophy in 1948. Walker then played professionally in the National Football League (NFL) with the Detroit Lions for six seasons, from 1950 to 1955.

Henno Martin was a German professor of geology who, along with Hermann Korn, lived for two years in the Namib Desert to avoid internment during the Second World War.