List of Famous people who died in 2002

René Frédéric Thom was a French mathematician. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became world-famous among the wider academic community and the educated general public for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory. He received the Fields Medal in 1958.

Mohammed Jihad Ahmed Jibril was the son of Ahmed Jibril, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC). He was assassinated in Beirut on 20 May 2002.

Huang Shun-hsing was a Taiwan-born politician. When he was born, Taiwan was ruled by Japan. Huang held political office in the Republic of China on Taiwan, and later in the People's Republic of China.

Yu Hsiu Ku or Gu Yuxiu was a Chinese academic and polymath. He was one of the first Chinese people to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1928, and became a leader in higher education in China until the fall of the Republic of China in 1949. Afterwards, he worked for many years as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jarallah Omar al-Kuhali was a Yemeni politician, intellectual, and guerrilla fighter. He was trained in Islamic law, but in the 1960s he turned towards Marxism. He was a political prisoner from 1968 to 1971 and participated in the civil war between North Yemen and South Yemen as a leader of the National Liberation Front, a politico-military coalition affiliated to the socialist government of the South. He escaped to the South after his forces were defeated by then-North Yemeni President and current unified Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Omar became a member of the Politburo of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), the ruling party in the South, and was named minister of culture in the government of a newly unified Yemen in the early 1990s. He resigned his cabinet post and went into exile shortly before a failed attempt by former southern politicians to re-establish a "Democratic Republic of Yemen" in 1994. The president of the ephemeral secessionist regime, Ali Salim al-Baidh, was a former ally of Omar in the factional disputes within the YSP in 1986. When Omar returned to the country in 1995, he developed a reputation as a leading advocate of human rights and political freedoms in the authoritarian political climate of Yemen.

Ekrem Akurgal was a Turkish archaeologist. During a career that spanned more than fifty years, he conducted definitive research in several sites along the western coast of Anatolia such as Phokaia (Foça), Pitane (Çandarlı), Erythrai (Ildırı) and old Smyrna.

Chang-lin Tien was a Chinese-American professor of mechanical engineering and university administrator. He was the seventh Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley (1990–1997), the first Asian to head a major university in the United States.