Notable Deaths on January 1

Shirley Anita Chisholm was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress. Chisholm represented New York's 12th congressional district, a district centered in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Throughout her career, she was known for taking "a resolute stand against economic, social, and political injustices", as well as being a strong supporter of black civil rights and women's rights.

David Joel Stern was an American lawyer and business executive who was the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1984 to 2014. He oversaw NBA basketball's growth into one of the world's most popular sports during the 1990s and 2000s. Stern is credited with developing and broadening the NBA's audience, especially internationally by setting up training camps, playing exhibition games, and recruiting more international players. In addition, with his guidance, the NBA opened 12 offices in cities outside the United States, and broadcast to over 200 territories in over 40 languages. Stern also helped found the Women's National Basketball Association and the NBA G League, the NBA's development league. Under Stern, the NBA launched their digital presence with NBA.com, NBA TV, and NBA League Pass. He also established the NBA's social responsibility program, NBA Cares.

Edward Henry Weston was an American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes, and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and especially Californian, approach to modern photography" because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.

John Shaw Torrington was a Royal Navy stoker. He was part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition to chart unexplored areas of what is now Nunavut, Canada, find the Northwest Passage, and make scientific observations. He was the first fatality of the expedition, of which all personnel ultimately died, mostly in and around King William Island. Torrington was buried on Beechey Island. His body was exhumed by forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie in 1984, to try to determine the cause of death. His remains are among the best preserved example of a corpse since the ancient Tollund Man which was found in the 1950s. Photographs of his mummified remains were widely published and inspired music and literature.

Robert James Gilbert Anderson was an English Olympic fencer and a renowned film fight choreographer, with a cinema career that spanned more than 50 years and included films such as Highlander, The Three Musketeers, Barry Lyndon, The Princess Bride, The Mask of Zorro, the Star Wars film series, The Lord of the Rings film series, the James Bond film series and the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. He was regarded as the premier choreographer of Hollywood sword-fighting, and during his career he coached many actors in swordsmanship, including Errol Flynn, Sean Connery, Antonio Banderas, Mark Hamill, Viggo Mortensen, Adrian Paul, and Johnny Depp. He also appeared as a stunt double for Darth Vader's lightsaber battles in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph was a German rocket engineer who was a leader of the effort to develop the V-2 rocket. After World War II, the United States government's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) brought him to the U.S. as part of the clandestine Operation Paperclip, where he became one of the main developers of the U.S. space program. He worked within the U.S. Army and NASA, where he managed the development of several systems, including the Pershing missile and the Saturn V Moon rocket. In 1984, the U.S. government investigated him for war crimes, and he agreed to renounce his United States citizenship and leave the U.S. in return for not being prosecuted.

William Henry Keeler, nicknamed "Wee Willie" because of his small stature, was an American professional baseball right fielder who played in the major leagues from 1892 to 1910, primarily for the Baltimore Orioles and Brooklyn Superbas in the National League, and the New York Highlanders in the American League. Keeler was a part of five teams that won the National League pennant. One of the greatest contact hitters of all time and notoriously hard to strike out, Keeler has the highest career at bats-per-strikeout ratio in major league history, averaging 63.17 at bats per strikeout. His plate appearance-per-strikeout ratio is also one of the best of all time, with Keeler averaging 70.66 plate appearances between strikeouts, second only to Joe Sewell, another Hall of Famer, who averaged 73.06 plate appearances between each strikeout. In 1939, Keeler was posthumously elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Charles Thomas Biass Turner was a bowler who is regarded as one of the finest ever produced by Australia. Among his accomplishments were:taking 283 wickets in the English season of 1888 for 11.27 runs each. This tally was 69 wickets ahead of Ted Peate's 1882 record, and has been bettered only by Tom Richardson in 1895 and Tich Freeman in 1928 and 1933. taking 314 wickets in all matches in 1888. taking 106 wickets in twelve matches in the Australian season of 1887–88 – a record for any bowler in Australia taking 17 wickets for 50 runs against An England Eleven at Hastings in 1888. Of these 17, 14 were bowled, two lbw and one stumped. being the first Australian bowler to reach 100 wickets in Test matches. his 12 for 87 against England in his record season of 1887–1888 is still the best bowling analysis for a Test at the SCG. the only bowler to take 50 wickets in their first six Test matches.

Hans Karl Hesse, known in later life as Carle Hessay, was a German-born Canadian painter. Although much remains uncertain of his early years, he immigrated to Canada in 1927, and later studied at art academies in Paris and Dresden. Hessay served as a Canadian soldier in World War II. After the establishment of peace, he moved to British Columbia, eventually settling in the town of Langley, where he took up art again in the 1950s. Some of his early paintings were done in the manner of Romantic realism. The influence of Expressionism soon became significant, with Hessay drawing on both the European and American movements, together with aspects of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.

William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian poet. He is often categorized as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott; he was a colleague of Lampman and Scott. By the end of the 19th century, he was considered the "unofficial poet laureate of Canada." Although not as well known as the other Confederation poets today, Campbell was a "versatile, interesting writer" who was influenced by Robert Burns, the English Romantics, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Tennyson. Inspired by these writers, Campbell expressed his own religious idealism in traditional forms and genres.

Edward Arthur Thompson was an Irish-born British Marxist historian of classics and medieval studies. He was professor and director of the classics department at the University of Nottingham from 1948 to 1979, and a fellow of the British Academy. Thompson was a pioneer in the study of late antiquity, and was for decades the most prominent British scholar in this field. He was particularly interested in the relations between Ancient Rome and "barbarian" peoples such as the Huns and Visigoths, and has been credited with revitalizing English-language scholarship on the history of early Germanic peoples. Thompson's works on these subjects have been highly influential.

Alfred Ely Beach was an American inventor, entrepreneur, publisher, and patent lawyer, born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is known for his design of the earliest predecessor to the New York City Subway, the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which became the first subway in America. He was an early owner and cofounder of Scientific American and Munn & Co., the country's leading patent agency, and helped secure patents for Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other innovators. A member of the Union League of New York, he also invented a typewriter for the blind and a system for heating water with solar power.

Kiro Gligorov was a Macedonian and Yugoslav statesman, economist, and politician who served as the first president of the Republic of Macedonia from 1991 to 1999. He was born and raised in Štip, where he was also educated. He continued his education in Skopje and graduated in law in Belgrade. During World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia, he worked as a lawyer and participated in the partisan resistance. By the end of the war, he was an organiser of the Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia, the predecessor of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia as a federal Yugoslav state.

Ulrich Beck was a German sociologist, and one of the most cited social scientists in the world during his lifetime. His work focused on questions of uncontrollability, ignorance and uncertainty in the modern age, and he coined the terms "risk society" and "second modernity" or "reflexive modernization". He also tried to overturn national perspectives that predominated in sociological investigations with a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the interconnectedness of the modern world. He was a professor at LMU Munich and also held appointments at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in Paris, and at the London School of Economics.

Floyd Douglas Little was an American professional football player who was a halfback for the Denver Broncos, initially in the American Football League (AFL) and later the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Syracuse Orangemen, twice earning All-American honors. Little was the sixth overall selection of the 1967 NFL/AFL draft, the first common draft. He was the first first-round draft pick to sign with the AFL's Broncos, where he was known as "the Franchise". Little was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2010.

Daniel Edward Reeves was an American professional football running back and coach in the National Football League (NFL). During his 38 years in the NFL, Reeves participated in nine Super Bowls, the third most for an individual. He was a head coach for 23 seasons, a position he held with the Denver Broncos from 1981 to 1992, the New York Giants from 1993 to 1996, and the Atlanta Falcons from 1997 to 2003. As a player, he spent his eight-season career with the Dallas Cowboys, who signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1965.

Victor Charles Buono was an American actor, comic, and briefly a recording artist. He was known for playing the villain King Tut in the television series Batman (1966–1968) and musician Edwin Flagg in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the latter of which earned him Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations. He was a busy actor from his late teens until his death at the age of 43 and, with his large size and sonorous voice, he made a career of playing men much older than he actually was.

Joaquín Rodríguez Ortega, professionally known as Cagancho, was a Spanish bullfighter much of whose career was spent in Mexico, although he did sometimes perform in his native Spain, and one of his performances there, in Almagro, Ciudad Real in 1927 even gave rise to a now well known expression in the Spanish language. Rodríguez also found himself appraised in English when he and his craft were described by Ernest Hemingway in his non-fiction work Death in the Afternoon, along with many other Spanish bullfighters of the early 20th century.

Grace Brewster Hopper was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator."