List of Famous people who died in 2002

Geoffrey William Arnold Dummer, MBE (1945), C. Eng., IEE Premium Award, FIEEE, MIEE, USA Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm was an English electronics engineer and consultant, who is credited as being the first person to popularise the concepts that ultimately led to the development of the integrated circuit, commonly called the microchip, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Dummer passed the first radar trainers and became a pioneer of reliability engineering at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern in the 1940s. Manchester College of Arts and Technology Born in Hull, Dummer studied electrical engineering at Manchester College of Technology starting in the early 1930s. By the early 1940s he was working at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern.

Jean-Toussaint Desanti was a French educator and philosopher known for his work on both the philosophy of mathematics and phenomenology.

John Sherwood de Lancie was an American oboist and arts administrator. He was principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra for 23 years and also director of the Curtis Institute of Music.

Oskar Sala was a 20th-century German physicist, composer and a pioneer of electronic music born in Greiz. He played an instrument called the Trautonium, a predecessor to the synthesizer.

Frank Ripploh was a German actor, film director, and author. He is best remembered for his semi-autobiographical 1980 film Taxi zum Klo. The film, produced on a shoestring budget of 100,000 DM, explored the day-to-day life of a Berlin schoolteacher who also led a very active gay sex life. Extremely explicit for its day, and for some time afterward, Taxi zum Klo was considered groundbreaking for the subject matter it portrayed, and achieved something of a cult status among gay audiences of the time. In 1987, Ripploh directed a sequel entitled Taxi nach Kairo, but the film was not considered as successful as its predecessor, and it was not released outside Germany.