List of Famous people who died in 2009

Thierry Aubin was a French mathematician who worked at the Centre de Mathématiques de Jussieu, and was a leading expert on Riemannian geometry and non-linear partial differential equations. His fundamental contributions to the theory of the Yamabe equation led, in conjunction with results of Trudinger and Schoen, to a proof of the Yamabe Conjecture: every compact Riemannian manifold can be conformally rescaled to produce a manifold of constant scalar curvature. Along with Yau, he also showed that Kähler manifolds with negative first Chern classes always admit Kähler–Einstein metrics, a result closely related to the Calabi conjecture. The latter result provides the largest class of known examples of compact Einstein manifolds. Aubin was the first mathematician to propose the Cartan–Hadamard conjecture.

Harry Alan Towers was a British radio and independent film producer and screenwriter. He wrote numerous screenplays for the films he produced, often under the pseudonym Peter Welbeck. He produced over 80 feature films and continued to write and produce well into his 80s. Towers was married to the actress Maria Rohm, who appeared in many of his films.

Lincoln Maazel was an American singer and actor of stage and screen.

Hans Wolfgang Liepmann was an American fluid dynamicist, aerospace scientist and emeritus Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology.

Robert Woodruff Anderson was an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatrical producer. He received two Academy Award nominations for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, for the drama films The Nun's Story (1959) and I Never Sang for My Father (1970), the latter based on his play.

Yoshirō Muraki was a Japanese production designer, art director, and costume designer. He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his work in the films Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985). He was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for his work in Yojimbo (1961). He is most well known for his collaborations with director Akira Kurosawa, having done work on all of Kurosawa's films from Record of a Living Being (1955) onward, with the exception of Dersu Uzala (1975). He was married to Shinobu Muraki.

Beatrice Gray was an American actress and dancer best known for her appearances in a series of western films during the 1940s and 1950s.