1926 births

Agustín García Calvo (October 15, 1926 – November 1, 2012) was a Spanish philologist, philosopher, poet and playwright.

Thyge Thøgersen (4 November 1926 – 18 February 2016) was a Danish long-distance runner. He competed at the 1952, 1956 and the 1960 Summer Olympics, placing 24th at 10,000 metres in the 1952, 6th in the 1960 marathon and 8th at 5000 metres in 1956.

Arne Christiansen (19 May 1926 – 23 January 2012) was a Norwegian judge.
He was born in Oslo. He enrolled in law studies in 1945, and graduated with the cand.jur. degree in 1949. He worked as a sub-director in the Ministry of Justice and the Police from 1964 to 1969, presiding judge in Eidsivating from 1970 to 1974 and as a Supreme Court Justice from 1974 to 1996. He also presided over the Norwegian Association of Judges and the International Association of Judges.He resided at Hosle. He died in 2012.

Walter Frederick Brown (born July 28, 1926) is an American politician and former presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA (2004). Brown became a socialist in 1948 but served as Democratic member of the Oregon State Senate from 1975 to 1987. Brown also served as a Socialist Party of Oregon candidate for the U.S. Congress (3rd Congressional District) in 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004 and has been the Pacific Green Party candidate for two statewide offices.

Elisabeth Elliot (née Howard; December 21, 1926 – June 15, 2015) was a Christian missionary, author, and speaker. Her first husband, Jim Elliot, was killed in 1956 while attempting to make missionary contact with the Auca people (now known as Huaorani; also rendered as Waorani or Waodani) of eastern Ecuador. She later spent two years as a missionary to the tribe members who killed her husband. Returning to the United States after many years in South America, she became widely known as the author of over twenty books and as a speaker. Elliot toured the country, sharing her knowledge and experience, well into her seventies.

Roland Peter Brown (5 June 1926 – 16 August 2019) was an American physician who spent the majority of his career in Taiwan.

Russell L. De Valois (December 15, 1926 – September 20, 2003) was an American scientist recognized for his pioneering research on spatial and color vision.

Van A. Harvey was George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies (Emeritus) at Stanford University. Born in Hankow, China, he served in the U.S. Navy (1943–46), and was awarded a BA in Philosophy from Occidental College (1948, Phi Beta Kappa). After attending Princeton Theological Seminary for one year, he received a B.D. from Yale Divinity School in 1951 and a PhD. from Yale University in 1957 in post-Enlightenment religious thought. His thesis was entitled "Myth, Faith, and History" and his thesis supervisor was H. Richard Niebuhr.Van Harvey taught at Princeton University (1954–58), Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University (1958–68), the University of Pennsylvania (1968–78), and Stanford University (1978–1996). He was Chair of the graduate program in religion at SMU and Chair of his departments at both the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford.The aim of his first book A Handbook of Theological Terms (1964) was to explain to laypersons the meaning of technical terms found in Christian theology, with special attention to issues dividing Protestant and Catholic theology. His second book The Historian and the Believer (1966) was concerned with the way in which "morality of knowledge" that informs professional historical inquiry poses problems for the believer and theologian who attempt to justify the historical claims of Christianity “on faith”, especially when historical inquiry is concerned with Jesus of Nazareth. Harvey argues that these problems have not been satisfactorily dealt with by modern Christian theologians. He pays particular attention to the theologies of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann states in a citation of this book that "I have long been more indebted to this than is evident from the number of explicit references" The third edition of 1996 contains a new introduction outlining his mature position on these issues.
One commentator has characterized Harvey's career after 1980 as having been transformed from theologian into skeptical student of religion. This change is reflected in both his articles and preeminently in his third book Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (1995), winner of the 1996 American Academy of Religion’s award for excellence in constructive-reflective studies. This book argues that the neglected later writings of Ludwig Feuerbach dropped much of the Hegelian elements informing his better-known early work and created a more powerful theory for the origins and persistence of religion. Harvey compares this theory with several well-known contemporary social-scientific and psychological theories and judges Feuerbach's to be superior.
Harvey was awarded an honorary degree in the Humanities from Occidental College, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships (1966 and 1972), a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship (1979), a Visiting Fellowship from Clare Hall, Cambridge University (1979), and distinguished teaching awards from both the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. He contributed to several encyclopedias and reference works including the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Harvey died July 11, 2021.

Richard Lea Dickey (October 26, 1926 – July 3, 2006) was an American professional basketball player for the National Professional Basketball League's Anderson Packers and National Basketball Association's Boston Celtics, although he is best remembered for his college career while playing at NC State.

Oswald Mathias Ungers (12 July 1926 – 30 September 2007) was a German architect and architectural theorist, known for his rationalist designs and the use of cubic forms. Among his notable projects are museums in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne.