List of Famous people who died in 2017

William "Gatz" Hjortsberg was an American novelist and screenwriter known for writing the screenplay of the film Legend.

Thomas J. Fleming was an American distance runner who won the 1973 and 1975 New York City Marathon. He was also a two time runner-up in the Boston Marathon in 1973 and 1974 and finished six times in the top ten in the BAA marathon. Fleming was the winner of the Cleveland, Toronto, Los Angeles, Jersey Shore and Washington DC marathons in the 1970s. He set a personal best of 2:12:05 in the Boston Marathon 1975, and was renowned for running 110 to 150 miles per week to train for road racing. He was awarded the United Nations Peace Medal in 1977.

Moshe Gershuni was an Israeli painter and sculptor. In his works, particularly in his paintings from the 1980s, he expressed a position different from the norm, commemorating The Holocaust in Israeli art. In addition, he created in his works a connection between bereavement and homoerotic sexuality, in the way he criticized society and Israeli Zionism-nationalism. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting for his work in 2003, but in the end it was revoked and he was deprived of receiving the prize.

Ronald Charles D. Breslow was an American chemist from Rahway, New Jersey. He was University Professor at Columbia University, where he was based in the Department of Chemistry and affiliated with the Departments of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology; he had also been on the faculty of its Department of Chemical Engineering. He had taught at Columbia since 1956 and was a former chair of the university's chemistry department.

Orri Vigfússon was an Icelandic entrepreneur and environmentalist. His stated objective was to "restore the abundance of wild salmon that formerly existed on both sides of the North Atlantic".

Gerhard Albert Baum, better known as Gregory Baum, was a German-born Canadian priest and theologian in the Roman Catholic Church. He became known in North America and Europe in the 1960s for his work on ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, and the relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews. In the later 1960s, he went to the New School for Social Theory in New York and became a sociologist, which led to his work on creating a dialogue between classical sociology and Christian theology.

James Patrick Donleavy was an American-Irish novelist, short story writer and playwright. His best-known work is the novel The Ginger Man, which was initially banned for obscenity.

Ali Hasan Nayfeh was a Palestinian-Jordanian mathematician, mechanical engineer and physicist. He is regarded as the most influential scholar and scientist in the area of applied nonlinear dynamics in mechanics and engineering. He was the inaugural winner of the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award, and was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in mechanical engineering. His pioneering work in nonlinear dynamics has been influential in the construction and maintenance of machines and structures that are common in daily life, such as ships, cranes, bridges, buildings, skyscrapers, jet engines, rocket engines, aircraft and spacecraft.

William Patrick Duggan was an Irish international rugby union player. He won 41 Irish caps, the first in 1975 and finished his international career in 1984 as captain. He toured New Zealand in 1977 with the British and Irish Lions, and at the time played club rugby for Blackrock College RFC, after commencing his career with Sunday's Well RFC in Cork.

Alain Levoyer was a French property lawyer and politician. He served as a member of the National Assembly from 1993 to 1997, where he represented Maine-et-Loire. He was also the mayor of Champtoceaux from 1977 to 2001.