List of Famous people who died in 2008

Oded Schramm was an Israeli-American mathematician known for the invention of the Schramm–Loewner evolution (SLE) and for working at the intersection of conformal field theory and probability theory.

Mikel Laboa Mancisidor was one of the Basque Country's most important singer-songwriters.

Lois June Nettleton was an American film, stage, radio, and television actress. She received three Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won two Daytime Emmy Awards.

Victor Almon McKusick was an American internist and medical geneticist, and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He was a proponent of the mapping of the human genome due to its use for studying congenital diseases. He is well known for his studies of the Amish. He was the original author and, until his death, remained chief editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM) and its online counterpart Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM). He is widely known as the "father of medical genetics".

Bernardin Gantin was a prominent Beninese cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Metropolitan Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cotonou and then at the Vatican in the service of the Holy See as President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and then as Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Bishops. Ultimately, he served as Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, a post his French consecrator as a bishop once held and the same position Joseph Ratzinger had after Gantin and before his election as Pope Benedict XVI. He was the highest ranking Catholic to come from Africa since ancient times, when some Popes were believed to have come from there. He enjoyed a close relationship with Pope John XXIII, Popes Paul VI and John Paul I, and most especially, with Pope John Paul II and his fellow curial cardinal and future Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. Like many senior African prelates of his era, he was relatively conservative, but was esteemed by both his native land and for his work in Rome. His tomb in Ouidah, which is frequently visited, was visited by Pope Benedict when he visited Benin. In May 2013, Vatican officials inaugurated a Chair about "Socializing Policy in Africa" bearing his name at the Pontifical Lateran University.

Aryeh (Arie) Dvoretzky was a Russian-born Israeli mathematician, the winner of the 1973 Israel Prize in Mathematics. He is best known for his work in functional analysis, statistics and probability. He was the eighth president of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Varazdat Harutyunyan was an Armenian academic, architect and writer.

Emilio Carballido was a Mexican writer who earned particular renown as a playwright.