1960 deaths

Walter Noddack (17 August 1893 – 7 December 1960) was a German chemist. He, Ida Tacke (who later married Noddack), and Otto Berg reported the discovery of element 43 and element 75 in 1925.

Gladys Alberta Bentley (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) was an American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance.
Her career skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a well-known gay speakeasy in New York in the 1920s, as a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tail coat and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience.
On the decline of the Harlem speakeasies with the repeal of Prohibition, she relocated to southern California, where she was billed as "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs". She was frequently harassed for wearing men's clothing. She tried to continue her musical career but did not achieve as much success as she had had in the past. Bentley was openly lesbian early in her career, but during the McCarthy Era she started wearing dresses and married, claiming to have been "cured" by taking female hormones.

Ramón Gay (born Ramón García Gay; November 28, 1917 – May 28, 1960) was a Mexican film actor. He was one of the stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, known to horror film fans for his role in The Aztec Mummy trilogy of films in the late 1950s.He was killed in 1960, when he was shot dead during a dispute with another man over the actress, Evangelina Elizondo (1929–2017).

Hugo Döblin (29 October 1876 – 4 November 1960) was a German stage and film actor. He appeared in more than eighty films, most of them during the silent era. The Jewish Döblin left Germany following the Nazi Party's rise to power in 1933, and after moving first to Czechoslovakia and Austria, eventually settled in Switzerland. His younger brother was novelist, essayist, and doctor Alfred Döblin (1878–1957).

Beno Gutenberg (; June 4, 1889 – January 25, 1960) was a German-American seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague and mentor of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude.

Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German scholar who also became known as a diarist. His journals, published in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic.
The three volumes of his diaries have been published in English translations: I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil. The first two cover the period of the Third Reich have since become standard sources and have been extensively quoted. His book Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in English as The Language of the Third Reich, studies how Nazi propaganda manipulated and influenced the German language.

Max Trautz (19 March 1880 – 19 August 1960) was a German chemist. He was very productive with over 190 scientific publications especially in the field of chemical kinetics. He was the first to investigate the activation energy of molecules by connecting Max Planck's new results concerning light with observations in chemistry.
He is also known as the founder of collision theory together with the British scientist William Lewis. While Trautz published his work in 1916, Lewis published it in 1918. However, they were unaware of each other's work due to World War I.

Hans Otto Friedrich Schlossberger (born 22 September 1887 in Alpirsbach, died 27 January 1960 in Stuttgart) was a German physician, who was known for his research in immunology, medical microbiology, epidemiology and antimicrobial chemotherapy, especially on syphilis, typhus, gas gangrene, diphtheria, erysipeloid of Rosenbach, tuberculosis, malaria and leptospirosis. He was one of the leading immunologists and bacteriologists of Germany during his lifetime, and was a student and collaborator of the Nobel laureates Paul Ehrlich and Emil von Behring, two of the principal founders of the field of immunology.
From 1946 to 1955, he was Professor of Medical Microbiology and Infection Control and Director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Infection Control at the Goethe University Frankfurt, and also served as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine 1952–1953. He edited the journal Medical Microbiology and Immunology and the influential book Experimental Bacteriology.

Lucie Gabrielle Randoin (11 May 1888 – 13 September 1960) was a French biologist, nutritionist, and hygienist. She was made a commander of the Legion of Honour in 1958 and is known for her research on vitamins.

Paul Fallot (25 June 1889 in Strasbourg – 21 October 1960 in Paris) was a French geologist and paleontologist. Throughout his career the Mediterranean region, and especially Spain, was the focus of his work.
Fallot began his studies in 1908 at the University of Lausanne, under the well known geologist Maurice Lugeon. In 1909 he moved to Grenoble to work at the laboratory of geologist and paleontologist Wilfred Kilian on ammonites of the Balearic Islands. In 1910-1911 he broadens his knowledge of general geology and stratigraphy at the Sorbonne led with Emile Haug.
From 1914 to 1916 he serves in the French army, which earned him the Croix de Guerre, with five honorable mentions, and the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur Cross.
After the war, Fallot was employed by his former teacher Kilian in Grenoble and continued his work in Mallorca. His "Geological Etude de la Sierra de Majorque" appears in 1922. The next year Paul Fallot was appointed director of the Institute of Applied Geology in Nancy, a position he keeps the next 14 years. With staff and students he worked in the Jura, but his main work he performed in the Betic ranges of southern Spain and the Rif Mountains of North Africa. In 1931 the Academy of Sciences grants Fallot the Grand Prix des Sciences physiques.
His appointment in 1937 as professor of Geology of the Mediterranean at the Collège de France, seemed the opportunity to scale up his work on the tectonics of the entire area with a team of specialists, but the outbreak of World War II hindered this. During the war he stayed in Paris, prepared publications of the Geological Service of Morocco, proposes a comprehensive document together on the geology of subbetische chains and analyzes the layers of the Triassic of Algeria.
In 1948 Paul Fallot was appointed as member of the Académie des Sciences. Fallot was also one of the foreign members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since May 1960. The Lower Cambrian trilobite genus Fallotaspis was named in his honour.