May 4, 2014

2014Dick Ayers, American author and illustrator (born 1924)^[†]

Richard Bache Ayers was an American comic book artist and cartoonist best known for his work as one of Jack Kirby's inkers during the late-1950s and 1960s period known as the Silver Age of Comics, including on some of the earliest issues of Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. He is the signature penciler of Marvel's World War II comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawing it for a 10-year run, and he co-created Magazine Enterprises' 1950s Western-horror character the Ghost Rider, a version of which he would draw for Marvel in the 1960s.

2014Elena Baltacha, Ukrainian-Scottish tennis player (born 1983)^[†]

Elena Sergeevna Baltacha was a Ukrainian-born British professional tennis player. Being a four-time winner of the AEGON Awards, she was also a long-term British No. 1, a position she held intermittently from 2002 to 2012. However, as a result of her absence from competition due to knee surgery, she dropped down the world rankings and at the time of her retirement on 18 November 2013, she was ranked as the world No. 221 and British No. 6. Her career-high ranking of world No. 49 was achieved in September 2010.

2014Edgar Cortright, American scientist and engineer (born 1923)^[†]

Edgar Maurice Cortright was a scientist and engineer, and senior official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States. His most prominent positions during his career were Director of NASA's Langley Research Center, and Chairman of the Apollo 13 Review Board which investigated the explosion that occurred during the Apollo 13 spaceflight in 1970.

2014Helga Königsdorf, German physicist and author (born 1938)^[†]

Helga Königsdorf was an East German statistician and novelist. She is notable for becoming distinguished in two distinct careers - science and literature. She wrote three books on mathematics, two co-written with her husband Olaf Bunke, who outlived her by seven years, and thirteen literary books of her own. My Indecent Dreams, her first collection of short stories, was published at the age of 40. Fission is her best-known novel. Königsdorf died of Parkinson's disease in 2014 at the age of 75.

2014Ross Lonsberry, Canadian-American ice hockey player (born 1947)^[†]

David Ross Lonsberry was a Canadian professional ice hockey left winger who played 15 seasons in the National Hockey League (NHL) for the Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins. He had his best seasons in a Flyers uniform and was a member of Philadelphia's back-to-back Stanley Cup championship teams in the mid-1970s.

2014Jean-Paul Ngoupandé, Central African politician, Prime Minister of the Central African Republic (born 1948)^[†]

Jean-Paul Ngoupandé was a Central African politician who was Prime Minister of the Central African Republic from 1996 to 1997. He stood as a presidential candidate in 1999 and 2005, and he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2006. He was President of the National Unity Party, an entity which he founded in the mid-1990s. He presented himself as an enemy of corruption and a defender of fair elections and democratic institutions.