Died. Darius Milhaud, 81, French composer of some 450 symphonies, operas, quartets, concertos and other works; of an apparent heart attack; in Geneva. Just after World War I, Milhaud became a member of Les Six, an informal group of irreverent young composers. His racy treatment of Brazilian popular songs, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, caused an uproar at its Paris premiere. La Creation du Monde, the 1923 ballet that is perhaps his masterpiece, was the first major classical composition effectively to incorporate elements of jazz. Of Provencal Jewish lineage, Milhaud fled the Nazis in 1940. Throughout World War II he taught at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., then shuttled between Paris and Mills until 1971. All the while he indulged his vast range of musical interests, dashing off finished pieces in one pen-and-ink draft without a piano.

Died. Vannevar Bush, 84, eminent scientist, administrator and humanist; of pneumonia; in Belmont, Mass. In 1922, while a Massachusetts Institute of Technology electrical-engineering professor, Bush with two friends founded the American Appliance Co., now the mammoth Raytheon Co. On campus, he later developed the differential analyzer, an ancestor of the modern computer, then resigned as engineering dean in 1938 to head Washington, D.C.'s Carnegie Institution, a leading research organization. During the war Bush oversaw work on the atomic bomb, radar and other military devices as director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In 1955 the reedy Yankee resigned the Carnegie post, later became M.I.T.'s honorary chairman, and filled his days hatching inventions and writing about science and society.

Died. Ernest Henry Gruening, 87, former U.S. Senator from Alaska; of cancer; in Washington, D.C. Son of a New York physician, Gruening graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1912, then abandoned medicine for journalism. He resigned as managing editor of the Boston Traveler when its publisher retracted an expose of mayoral malfeasance; then he successively edited the Boston Journal, New York Tribune and the Nation, and became a diehard New Dealer. Named Governor of Alaska by President Roosevelt in 1939, Gruening forced absentee salmon and gold interests to pay their fair share of territorial taxes. After agitating successfully for Alaska's statehood, he went to the Senate in 1959 where, five years later, only he and Wayne Morse voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing U.S. action in the Viet Nam War. Unseated in 1968 by Mike Gravel, Gruening at 81 retired to the Nation and continued stumping for liberal causes.

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