List of Famous people who died in 2002

Leonhard Deininger was a German politician, representative of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria.

Professor Joachim Zahn was the chairman of Daimler Benz AG between 1971 and 1979.

Kristen Nygaard was a Norwegian computer scientist, programming language pioneer, and politician. Internationally, Nygaard is acknowledged as the co-inventor of object-oriented programming and the programming language Simula with Ole-Johan Dahl in the 1960s. Nygaard and Dahl received the 2001 A. M. Turing Award for their contribution to computer science.

Rudolf Fleischmann was a German experimental nuclear physicist from Erlangen, Bavaria. He worked for Walther Bothe at the Physics Institute of the University of Heidelberg and then at the Institute for Physics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research. Through his association with Bothe, he became involved in the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; one of Fleischmann’s areas of interest was isotope separation techniques. In 1941 he was appointed associate professor of experimental physics at the newly established Reichsuniversität Straßburg, in France. Late in 1944, he was arrested under the American Operation Alsos and sent to the United States. After he returned to Germany 1946, he became Director of the State Physical Institute at the University of Hamburg and developed it as a center of nuclear research. In 1953, he took a position at the University of Erlangen and achieved emeritus status in 1969. He was a signatory of the Göttingen Manifesto in 1957.

Gabriel Abraham Almond was an American political scientist best known for his pioneering work on comparative politics, political development, and political culture.

Leon Joseph Hart was an American football end. He won the Heisman Trophy and the Maxwell Award while at the University of Notre Dame in 1949 and played in the National Football League (NFL) for eight seasons, from 1950 to 1957, with the Detroit Lions.

Thomas John Dowd was an American recording engineer and producer for Atlantic Records. He was credited with innovating the multitrack recording method. Dowd worked on a veritable "who's who" of recordings that encompassed blues, jazz, pop, rock and soul records.

Nikolai Nikolayevich Rukavishnikov was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew three space missions of the Soyuz programme: Soyuz 10, Soyuz 16, and Soyuz 33. Two of these missions, Soyuz 10 and Soyuz 33 were intended to dock with Salyut space stations, but failed to do so.