List of Famous people who died in 2008

Boris Valerianovich Chirikov was a Soviet and Russian physicist. He was the founder of the physical theory of Hamiltonian chaos and made pioneering contributions to the theory of quantum chaos. In 1959, he invented the Chirikov criterion which gives an analytical estimate for the overlap of resonances and provides the conditions for transition from integrability to global chaos in Hamiltonian dynamical systems.

Percy Newbold "Peter" Coe was a British athletics coach, author, translator and coach of his son Sebastian Coe.

Malcolm Carnegie McKenna (1930–2008) was an American paleontologist and author on the subject.

Pehr Henrik Nordgren was a Finnish composer.

Francis Daniel Crean was an Australian politician who served as a member of the House of Representatives from 1951 to 1977, representing the Labor Party. He was a minister in the Whitlam Government, including as Treasurer from 1972 to 1974 and Deputy Prime Minister for a few months in 1975.

Inga Nielsen was a Danish soprano who had an active international opera career from 1971 to 2006. A child prodigy, Nielsen performed on American radio during the 1950s, beginning at the age of six, and also released some commercial recordings of Danish folk songs and Christmas carols as a child. She began her opera career performing parts in the lyric soprano repertory and then became an admired singer of dramatic soprano roles, beginning in the late 1980s. She was a particularly renowned interpreter of the roles of Konstanze in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the title role in Richard Strauss's Salome. She excelled in portraying some of the more rarely heard and demanding dramatic soprano roles such as the woman in Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung, Ursula in Mathis der Maler and Jenny in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Georgia van der Rohe was a German dancer, actress, and director.