* 1939 – Johnny Raper, Australian rugby league footballer

* 1939 – Joseph Lyons, Australian politician, 10th Prime Minister of Australia ( b. 1879 )

* 1939 – Fred Schepisi, Australian film director

* 1939 – Glenda Adams, Australian author ( d. 2007 )

Between 1939 and 1945, Holden's produced more than 30, 000 bodies for the Australian and US forces and manufactured a wide range of equipment, including field guns, aircraft, boats, including truck, aeroplane and marine engines and components.

* 1939 – John Howard, Australian politician, 25th Prime Minister of Australia

* 1939 – Phillip Adams, Australian broadcaster and journalist

* 1939 – Murray Rose, Australian swimmer

* 1891 – Ron Oxenham, Australian cricketer ( d. 1939 )

* 1939 – Reg Gasnier, Australian rugby player

* 2012 – Alan Thorne, Australian anthropologist ( b. 1939 )

The first Australian motels include the West End Motel in Ballina, New South Wales ( 1937 ) and the Penzance Motel in Eagle Hawk, Tasmania ( 1939 ).

* 1939 – Clive James, Australian television presenter and writer

* 1939 – Paul Hogan, Australian actor

* 1939 – George Lazenby, Australian actor

* 1879 – Joseph Lyons, Australian politician, 10th Prime Minister of Australia ( d. 1939 )

* 1939 – Gerry Harvey, Australian businessman, co-founded Harvey Norman

In 1939 the Australian IWW had four members, according to surveillance by government authorities, and these members were consistently opposed to the Second World War.

During October 1939, almost a month after returning home, Powell enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as an Australian.

* April 15 – Murray Rose, Australian swimmer ( b. 1939 )

Joseph Aloysius Lyons, CH ( 15 September 1879 – 7 April 1939 ) was an Australian politician.

On 7 April 1939, in Sydney, Lyons died suddenly of a heart attack – the first Australian Prime Minister to die in office.

Paul Hogan ( born 1939 ) is an Australian actor.

* John Anderson ( sailor ) ( born 1939 ), Australian sailor

First synthesized in 1874 by Othmar Zeidler, DDT's insecticidal properties were not discovered until 1939 by the Swiss scientist Paul Hermann Müller, who was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his efforts.

* 1939 – Akbar Adibi, Iranian scientist ( d. 2000 )

* 1939 – Claude Ake, Nigerian political scientist

In 1939, Bogart played a mad scientist in The Return of Doctor X.

* 1939 – Leland H. Hartwell, American scientist, Nobel laureate

* 1939 – John Hopcroft, American computer scientist

* August 28 – Vladimir Shukhov, Russian engineer-polymath, scientist and architect ( d. 1939 )

Stephen Arthur Cook ( born December 14, 1939, Buffalo, New York ) is a renowned American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made major contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity.

Professor Philip James Stradling Williams ( 11 January 1939 – 10 June 2003 ) was a Welsh politician for Plaid Cymru and scientist.

Dr. Wen Ho Lee (; born December 21, 1939 ) is a Taiwan-born American scientist who worked for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

John Edward Hopcroft ( born October 7, 1939 ) is an American theoretical computer scientist.

Zviad Gamsakhurdia (, ( March 31, 1939 — December 31, 1993 ) was a dissident, scientist and writer, who became the first democratically elected President of the Republic of Georgia in the post-Soviet era.

In September 1939, the British decided to assign a scientist to the Intelligence section of the Air Ministry.

Another British scientist working on radar technology and techniques was R. V. Jones, who had been appointed in 1939 as Britain's first Scientific Intelligence Officer and had spent the first years of the conflict researching how advanced the German radar technology was in comparison to Britain, and convincing doubters that the Germans actually had radar.

* William Wulf ( born 1939 ), American computer scientist

Lavoslav Ružička ForMemRS born as Lavoslav ( Leopold ) Ružička ( 13 September 1887 – 26 September 1976 ) was a Croatian scientist and winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry who worked most of his life in Switzerland.

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker ( born June 25, 1939 in Zürich, Switzerland ) is a German scientist and politician.

In December 1972, John Bardeen, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, established an endowment fund " to perpetuate the memory of Fritz London, distinguished scientist and member of the Duke faculty from 1939 to the time of his death in 1954, and to promote research and understanding of Physics at Duke University and in the wider scientific community ".

On April 5, 1939, Hamlin introduced a new plot device, which greatly expanded his choice of storylines: a time machine, invented by the 20th-century scientist Dr. Elbert Wonmug, who bore a rather suspicious resemblance to the Grand Wizer.

Peter Glotz ( March 6, 1939 – August 25, 2005 ) was a German social democratic politician ( Social Democratic Party ) and social scientist.

Ahmet Taner Kışlalı ( July 10, 1939 in Zile, Turkey – October 21, 1999 in Ankara ) was a Turkish intellectual, political scientist, lawyer, journalist / author, academics and politician.

These scientists inspired and educated a second generation with more notable scientist like Ervin Laszlo ( 1932 ) and Fritjof Capra ( 1939 ), who wrote about systems theory in the 1970s and 1980s.

Harold Elliot Varmus ( born December 18, 1939 ) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the 14th and current Director of the National Cancer Institute, a post he was appointed to by President Barack Obama.

Leon Richard Kass ( born February 12, 1939 ) is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the " Great Books ," as an opponent of human cloning and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research, and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005.