List of Famous people who died in 2002

Claude Jacques Berge was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory.

Alexandru Todea was a Romanian Greek-Catholic bishop of the Alba Iulia Diocese and later cardinal. He was also a victim of the communist regime, suffering at Jilava, Sighet, and Pitești prisons.

Rosetta LeNoire was an American stage, movie, and television actress as well as a Broadway producer and casting agent. LeNoire is known to contemporary audiences for her work in television. She had regular roles on the series Gimme a Break! and Amen, and is best known for her role as Estelle "Mother Winslow" on Family Matters, which ran from 1989 to 1998. In 1999, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Vladislas "Vlado" Perlemuter was a Lithuanian-born French pianist and teacher.

The Erfurt massacre was a school shooting that occurred on 26 April 2002 at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium, a secondary school, in the Thuringia State capital Erfurt, Germany. 19-year-old expelled student Robert Steinhäuser shot and killed 16 people, including 13 staff members, two students, and one police officer, before committing suicide. One person was also wounded by a bullet fragment. According to students, he ignored them and aimed only for the teachers and administrators, although two students were unintentionally killed by shots fired through a locked door.

Carmelo Pompilio Realino Antonio Bene, known as Carmelo Bene was an Italian actor, poet, film director and screenwriter. He was an important exponent of the Italian avant-garde theatre and cinema. He died of a heart ailment in 2002.

Shirley Scott was an American jazz organist.

Ole-Johan Dahl was a Norwegian computer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard.

Normand Lockwood was an American composer born in New York, New York. He studied composition at the University of Michigan from 1921–1924, and then traveled to Rome and studied composition under Ottorino Respighi from 1925 to 1926, and during this time he also had composition lessons with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He won a Prix de Rome in 1929 that allowed him to continue his work in Rome. He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.

Earle Brown was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of open form, a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since—notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s and generations of younger composers.