October 17, 2012

2012Milija Aleksic, English-South African footballer (born 1951)^[†]

Milija Anthony Aleksic was an English professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper, making 138 appearances in the Football League.

2012Émile Allais, French skier (born 1912)^[†]

Émile Allais was a champion alpine ski racer from France; he won all three events at the 1937 world championships in Chamonix and the gold in the combined in 1938. Born in Megève, he was a dominant racer in the late 1930s and is considered to have been the first great French alpine skier.

2012Henry Friedlander, German-American historian and author (born 1930)^[†]

Henry Egon Friedlander was a German-American Jewish historian of the Holocaust who was noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of casualties of the Holocaust.

2012Stanford R. Ovshinsky, American scientist and businessman, co-founded Energy Conversion Devices (born 1922)^[†]

Stanford Robert Ovshinsky was an American engineer, scientist and inventor who over a span of fifty years was granted well over 400 patents, mostly in the areas of energy and information. Many of his inventions have had wide-ranging applications. Among the most prominent are: the nickel-metal hydride battery, which has been widely used in laptop computers, digital cameras, cell phones, and electric and hybrid cars; flexible thin-film solar energy laminates and panels; flat panel liquid crystal displays; rewritable CD and DVD discs; hydrogen fuel cells; and nonvolatile phase-change memory.

2012Kōji Wakamatsu, Japanese director, producer, and screenwriter (born 1936)^[†]

Kōji Wakamatsu was a Japanese film director who directed such pink films as Ecstasy of the Angels and Go, Go, Second Time Virgin . He also produced Nagisa Ōshima's controversial film In the Realm of the Senses (1976). He has been called "the most important director to emerge in the pink film genre," and one of "Japan's leading directors of the 1960s".