List of Famous people who died in 1999

Rolf William Landauer was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. In 1961 he discovered Landauer's principle, that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulates information, such as erasing a bit of memory, entropy increases and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat. This principle is relevant to reversible computing, quantum information and quantum computing. He also is responsible for the Landauer formula relating the electrical resistance of a conductor to its scattering properties. He won the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society and the IEEE Edison Medal, among many other honors.

Comer Vann Woodward was a Pulitzer-prize winning American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics. Stylistically, he was a master of irony and counterpoint. Woodward was on the left end of the history profession in the 1930s. By the 1950s he was a leading liberal and supporter of civil rights. His demonstration that racial segregation was a late-19th-century invention rather than some sort of eternal standard made his The Strange Career of Jim Crow into "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement", said Martin Luther King Jr. After attacks on him by the New Left in the late 1960s, he moved to the right politically.

Oscar Cullmann was a Lutheran theologian. He is best known for his work in the ecumenical movement and was partly responsible for the establishment of dialogue between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions. Because of his intense ecumenical work, Cullmann's Basel colleague Karl Barth joked with him that his tombstone would bear the inscription "advisor to three popes."

Osman Ahmed Osman ‎ was an Egyptian engineer, contractor, entrepreneur, and politician. Known commonly as el-mo'alim, Osman founded the Arab Contractors and led the Egyptian effort to build the Aswan Dam. He went on to become the Egyptian Minister of Housing and Development and later a member of the Egyptian Parliament.

András Hegedüs was a Hungarian Communist politician who served as Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1955 to 1956. He fled to the Soviet Union on 28 October, the fifth day of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but returned in 1958 and taught sociology.

Gyula Zsengellér was a Hungarian footballer who played as a striker. A legend of Újpest FC, he is most famous for his part in taking the Hungarian national team to the 1938 World Cup Final. He was that tournament's second-highest scorer, behind Leonidas of Brazil.

Grete Weil was a German writer of Jewish origin.