1962 deaths

Jean-Pierre Gontran de Montaigne, vicomte de Poncins, known as Gontran De Poncins (August 19, 1900 – September 1, 1962), was a French writer and adventurer.

Léon Binoche (16 August 1878 – 28 August 1962) was a French rugby union player who competed in the 1900 Summer Olympics. He was a member of the French rugby union team, which won the gold medal. His great-niece is the actress Juliette Binoche.

Victor Bourgeois (29 August 1897 – 24 July 1962) was a Belgian architect and urban planner, considered the greatest Belgian modernist architect.
Bourgeois was born in Charleroi and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1914 through 1918, and was mentored by Henry van de Velde. Together with his brother Pierre Bourgeois, he founded several magazines, including 7 Arts (1922–1928).
In 1927 Bourgeois became the only Belgian invited to design a house for the Weissenhof Estate exhibition in Stuttgart, and the following year Bourgeois was a delegate to the first meeting of the Congrès international d'architecture moderne and a founding member of that organization.
He died on 24 July 1962 in Ixelles.

John Charles Schafer (May 7, 1893 – June 9, 1962) was a U.S. Representative from Wisconsin.
Born in Milwaukee, Schafer fought in the First World War in France, serving for twenty-two months. In 1921, he was elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly before running for Congress a year later. Schafer was first elected to Congress as a Republican to the 68th Congress representing Wisconsin's 4th congressional district. He was then reelected to the four succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1923 – March 3, 1933).
He lost his reelection bids in 1932, and failed in 1934 and 1936 to regain his old seat. In 1938, with the Democrats divided, he regained his old seat for the Seventy-sixth Congress. In 1940 he was again ousted by Democrat Thaddeus Wasielewski (whom he'd narrowly beaten in 1938), coming in third behind Wasielewski and Progressive former state senator Leonard C. Fons (Wasielewski polled 57,381 votes [35.62%]; Fons 52,907 [32.84%] and Schafer 50,796 [31.53%]). Schafer unsuccessfully contested the election results.Schafer ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for the Senate in 1957 to fill the vacancy left by the death of Joseph McCarthy.
Schafer returned to private life and died in Pewaukee in 1962.

Max Goberman (8 February 1911 – 31 December 1962) was an American conductor. He conducted ballets, Broadway musicals (including the original productions of Leonard Bernstein's On the Town and West Side Story), and the classical repertoire. He was working on the first recording of the complete symphonies of Joseph Haydn, but died while slightly less than halfway through the project.

Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz, alias Fritz W. Schulz, (2 April 1884, in Berlin – 12 June 1962, in Hamburg) was a German marine artist and illustrator of the 20th century.

Ernst Ulrich Hans von Leyser (German pronunciation: [ˈeʁnst ˈuːlʁiːx ˈxans fon ˈlaɪsa]) (18 November 1889 – 23 September 1962) was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II who commanded several army corps.
After the war, in 1947, Leyser was tried for war crimes committed in the Balkans and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment during the Hostages Trial; his sentence was commuted to time served and he was released in 1951.

Hartland Sweet Snyder (1913, Salt Lake City – 1962) was an American physicist who, together with Robert Oppenheimer, showed how large stars would collapse to form black holes. This work modeled the gravitational collapse of a pressure-free homogeneous fluid sphere and found that it would be unable to communicate with the rest of the universe.
This discovery was depicted in the movie Oppenheimer, where Snyder was portrayed by actor Rory Keane.Historian of physics David C. Cassidy assessed that this prediction of black holes might have won a Nobel Prize in Physics had the authors been alive in the 1990s when evidence was available.Some publications Snyder authored together with Ernest Courant laid the foundations for the field of accelerator physics. In particular, Snyder with Courant and Milton Stanley Livingston developed the principle of strong focusing that made modern particle accelerators possible. The Courant–Snyder parameters, a method of characterizing the distribution of particles in a beam, were an important part of that contribution.In 1954, Snyder bet against Maurice Goldhaber that antiprotons existed, and won.

Hans-Gustav Felber (July 8, 1889 – March 8, 1962) was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II.

Franz Heinrich Kaiser (25 April 1891 – 13 March 1962) was a German astronomer.He worked at the Heidelberg-Königstuhl Observatory from 1911 to 1914 while working on his Ph.D. there, which he obtained in 1915. During this time, Heidelberg was a center of asteroid discovery, and Kaiser discovered 21 asteroids during his time there.The outer main-belt asteroid 3183 Franzkaiser was named in his memory on 1 September 1993 (M.P.C. 22497).