List of Famous people who died in 2009

Geneviève Joy was a French classical and modernist pianist who, at the end of World War II in 1945, formed a critically acclaimed duo-piano partnership with Jacqueline Robin which lasted for forty-five years, until 1990. The composer Henri Dutilleux, whom she married in 1946, dedicated his Piano Sonata to her, which she recorded for Erato Records in 1988.

Sverre Fehn was a Norwegian architect.

Thomas Ponce Gill was a Hawaii politician. A member of the Democratic party, he served in the United States Congress from 1963 to 1965 and was the third lieutenant governor of Hawaii from 1966 to 1970. He unsuccessfully ran for governor twice, in 1970 and 1974.

Salvatore "Torrie" Zito was an American pianist, music arranger, composer and conductor.

Andrew Donald Booth was a British electrical engineer, physicist and computer scientist, who was an early developer of the magnetic drum memory for computers. He is known for Booth's multiplication algorithm.

Ruth Lilly was an American philanthropist, the last surviving great-grandchild of Eli Lilly, founder of the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical firm, and heir to the Lilly family fortune. A lifelong resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, Ruth Lilly is estimated to have given away nearly $800 million of her inheritance during her lifetime, mostly in support of the arts, education, health, and environmental causes in Indianapolis and in Indiana.

Victor Lvovich Zaslavsky was a professor of political sociology who taught at institutions such as LUISS, the Leningrad State University, Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Canada, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere during a long academic career. He developed trenchant analyses of political and social aspects of the Soviet Union, prior to and following its collapse. Born in Leningrad, Zaslavsky was a naturalized citizen of Canada. He was a member of the board of the political journal TELOS for several decades. His major work prior to his death in 2009 was Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn, which received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought from the Heinrich Boell Foundation. Zaslavsky's articles published in journals throughout the later years of the 20th century gained him a following in the United States and across continental Europe.

Sir Edward Thomas ("Ted") Downes, CBE was an English conductor, specialising in opera.