Notable Deaths on May 22

Martin Gardner was an American writer on popular mathematics and popular science. His interests also encompassed magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.

Robert Moses "Lefty" Grove was an American professional baseball pitcher. After having success in the minor leagues during the early 1920s, Grove became a star in Major League Baseball (MLB) with the American League's Philadelphia Athletics and Boston Red Sox. One of the greatest pitchers in history, Grove led the American League in wins in four separate seasons, in strikeouts seven consecutive seasons, and had the league's lowest earned run average a record nine times. Over the course of the three years from 1929 to 1931, he twice won the pitcher's Triple Crown, leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, while amassing a 79–15 record and leading the Athletics to three straight AL championships. Overall, Grove won 300 games in his 17-year MLB career. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1947.

Gaetano Bresci was an Italian anarchist who assassinated King Umberto I of Italy. His experience working as a young weaver led him to the conclusion that he had faced exploitation in the workplace, which attracted him to anarchism. Bresci emigrated to the United States, where he became involved with other Italian immigrant anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey. News of the Bava Beccaris massacre motivated him to return to Italy, where he planned to assassinate Umberto in response. Local police knew of his return but did not mobilize. Bresci killed the king in July 1900 during Umberto's scheduled appearance in Monza amid a sparse police presence.

David Andrew Wilkie was a Scottish swimmer who was the Olympic 200m breaststroke champion in 1976, the first British swimmer to win an Olympic gold medal since Anita Lonsbrough in 1960, and the first British man to do so since Henry Taylor in 1908. He is the only person to have held British, Commonwealth, European, World and Olympic swimming titles at the same time. Wilkie, a member of the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame and the International Swimming Hall of Fame, has been described as Scotland's greatest and Britain's finest swimmer. Fellow Olympic breaststroke gold medallist Duncan Goodhew considered him an "extraordinary talent" and "one of Britain's greatest ever athletes".

Mordecai Manuel Noah was an American sheriff, playwright, diplomat, journalist, and utopian. He was born in a family of mixed Ashkenazi and Portuguese Sephardic ancestry and was the grandson of Jonas Phillips. He was the most important Jewish lay leader in New York in the early 19th century, and one of the first Jews born in the United States to reach national prominence. He is best known for envisioning a homeland for the Jewish people in upstate New York. Long taken by the idea of a Jewish territorial restoration, in 1825 Noah purchased a tract of land on Grand Island in the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York, which he named Ararat. He erected a monument on the island and envisioned the establishment of a Jewish colony there. Though the proposal elicited much discussion, the attempt was not a success. After the failure of the Ararat experience, Noah turned more strongly to the idea of Palestine as a national home for Jews. As the best-known American Jew of his time, Noah in 1840 delivered the principal address at a meeting at B’nai Jeshurun in New York protesting the Damascus Affair.

Albert Claude was a Belgian-American cell biologist and medical doctor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade. His elementary education started in a comprehensive primary school at Longlier, his birthplace. He served in the British Intelligence Service during the First World War, and got imprisoned in concentration camps twice. In recognition of his service, he was granted enrolment at the University of Liège in Belgium to study medicine without any formal education required for the course. He earned his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1928. Devoted to medical research, he initially joined German institutes in Berlin. In 1929 he found an opportunity to join the Rockefeller Institute in New York. At Rockefeller University he made his most groundbreaking achievements in cell biology. In 1930 he developed the technique of cell fractionation, by which he discovered the agent of the Rous sarcoma, as well as components of cell organelles such as the mitochondrion, chloroplast, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, ribosome, and lysosome. He was the first to employ the electron microscope in the field of biology. In 1945 he published the first detailed structure of cell. His collective works established the complex functional and structural properties of cells.

Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science widely considered to have been influential in his fields. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis, elementary sentence-differences, algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory of linguistic information, and a principled account of the nature and origin of language.

William James Glackens was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School, which rejected the formal boundaries of artistic beauty laid down by the conservative National Academy of Design. He is also known for his work in helping Albert C. Barnes to acquire the European paintings that form the nucleus of the famed Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. His dark-hued, vibrantly painted street scenes and depictions of daily life in pre-WW I New York and Paris first established his reputation as a major artist. His later work was brighter in tone and showed the strong influence of Renoir. During much of his career as a painter, Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.

Volodymyr Katriuk was a Ukrainian-Canadian soldier and beekeeper, who was accused of having taken part in the Khatyn massacre and other massacres under the cover of anti-partisan warfare as a member of the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118 during World War II. In the annual Nazi War Criminal Report for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, Katriuk was ranked number three under the list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals as determined by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Katriuk denied any involvement in war crimes. On 18 March 2024, the Supreme Court of Belarus ruled that Katriuk was guilty of the "genocide of the Belarusian people".

Giovanni Bernardi, also known as Giovanni da Castel Bolognese and as Giovanni da Castelbolognese, was an Italian gem engraver and medallist who was born in Castel Bolognese, Italy. He was the son of a goldsmith and by 1530 had moved to Rome, where he had a position in the Papal mint, which also allowed him time to work for other patrons. These included Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici (1511–35), Pope Clement VII (1523–34), Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III, as well as his grandson, also called Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. He was "a skillful composer of elegant nudes in elaborate scenes".

Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland was an English nobleman and military commander in the lead up to the Wars of the Roses. He was the son of Henry "Hotspur" Percy, and the grandson of Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland. His father and grandfather were killed in different rebellions against Henry IV in 1403 and 1408, respectively, and the young Henry spent his minority in exile in Scotland. Only after the death of Henry IV in 1413 was he reconciled with the Crown, and in 1414 he was created Earl of Northumberland.

Karl-August Fagerholm was a Finnish politician. Fagerholm served as Speaker of Parliament and three times as Prime Minister of Finland. Fagerholm became one of the leading politicians of the Social Democrats after the armistice in the Continuation War. As a Scandinavia-oriented Swedish-speaking Finn, he was believed to be more to the taste of the Soviet Union's leadership than his predecessor, Väinö Tanner. Fagerholm's postwar career was, however, marked by fierce opposition from both the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Finland. He narrowly lost the presidential election to Urho Kekkonen in 1956.

Anna Judith Gertrud Helene Kerr was a German-born British writer and illustrator whose books sold more than 10 million copies around the world. She created both enduring picture books such as the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea and acclaimed novels for older children such as the semi-autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which gave a child's-eye view of escaping Hitler's persecution in the Second World War. Born in the Weimar Republic, she came to Britain with her family in 1935 to escape persecution during the rise of the Nazis.

Richard Alfred Tapia was an American mathematician and academic who was a professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He held the title of University Professor, the university's highest academic rank. In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Tapia the Presidential Award for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Mentoring. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Tapia the National Medal of Science. He was the Maxfield and Oshman professor of engineering; associate director of graduate studies, Office of Research and Graduate Studies; and director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University.

Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Anglo-Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles that occurred in Ireland during her lifetime.

Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He played a pivotal role in elevating the status of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the Edict of Milan decriminalising Christian practice and ceasing Christian persecution. This was a turning point in the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. He founded the city of Constantinople and made it the capital of the Empire, which it remained for over a millennium.

Charlotte Serber was an American journalist, statistician and librarian. She was the librarian of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, and the laboratory's only female group leader. After the war she attempted to secure a position as a librarian at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, but was rejected for lack of a security clearance; the likely reason was due to her political views. She later became a production assistant for the Broadway Theatre, and an interviewer for Louis Harris.

Shripad Amrit Dange was an Indian politician who was a founding member of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and a stalwart of Indian trade union movement. During the 20th century, Dange was arrested by the authorities for communist and trade union activities and was jailed for an overall period of 13 years. His early years were marked by the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Trial, and later by internal controversy over alleged 1924 letters in which he sought leniency from the British colonial administration.

Ernst Toller was a German author, playwright, left-wing politician, and revolutionary known for his Expressionist plays. He served for six days in 1919 as president of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, after which he became head of its army. He was imprisoned for five years for his part in the Bavarian Soviet Republic's armed resistance to the central government in Berlin. In prison, Toller wrote several plays that gained him international renown. They were performed in London, New York City, and Berlin.