Spencer Silver, a research chemist at 3M who created the kind of adhesive that allows Post-It Notes to be removed from surfaces as easily as they adhere to them, died May 8 at his home in St. Paul, MN. He was 80.

Since their introduction in 1980, Post-It Notes have become a ubiquitous office product, first in the form of little canary-yellow pads — billions of which are sold annually — and later in different hues and sizes. There are currently more than 3,000 Post-It brand products globally.

At first, the adhesive appeared to be the solution to a problem that didn’t exist, The New York Times said. But Dr. Silver promoted his adhesive throughout 3M in the hope that product development people would recognize it as the Breakthrough Dr. Silver thought it was.

Art Fry, a chemical engineer in the tape division lab, had heard about Dr. Silver’s adhesive. “It was a eureka, head-flapping moment,” Mr. Fry told Financial Times. Mr. Fry received a patent for the Post-It,

technically a “repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material.”

Dr. Silver and Mr. Fry were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010. Dr. Silver received the American Chemical Society’s Award for Creative Invention in 1998.

Alber Elbaz, a Moroccan-born Israeli fashion designer who rejuvenated Lanvin and had recently started a new venture, AZ Factory, died April 24 in Paris. He was 59. The cause was Covid-19, according to Richemont, the company backing Mr. Elbaz’s brand.

Beloved by his celebrity clients, like Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Beyoncé, Lupita Nyong’o and Michelle Obama, and his peers, Mr. Albaz had launched AZ Factory after a five-year hiatus following his abrupt firing from Lanvin, where he was fashion director from 2001 to 2015.

In 2015, as he received the Fashion Group International award, he said, “We designers, we ask ‘What do women want? What do women need? What can I do for a woman to make her life better and easier? How can I make a woman more beautiful?’”

In New York, Mr. Elbaz became the assistant designer of Geoffrey Beene, then moved to Paris in 1996 to become head of design at Guy Laroche. Two years later, Yves Saint Laurent chose Mr. Elbaz to take over as his heir. When Gucci Group bought the brand in 1999, Mr. Elbaz was soon fired in favor of Tom Ford.

Mr. Elbaz received the International Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2005, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2007. In 2016, the French government named him an officer of the Legion of Honor.

“I asked myself, ‘If I was a woman, what would I want?’” Mr. Elbaz told The New York Times in January. “Something that is first comfortable. Something fun. Something that lets me eat a big piece of cake.” [Pictured, a 2011 design by Mr. Elbaz for Lanvin. Francois Guillot/AFP via Getty Images]

 Eli Broad, a businessman and philanthropist whose vast fortune, extensive art collection and zeal for civic improvement helped reshape the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87.

The museums, medical research centers and cultural institutions emblazoned with the names of Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, include the Broad Art Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Broad Center for the Biological Sciences at the California Institute of Technology; and centers for regenerative medicine and stem-cell research at three California universities. The Broad, a $140 million art museum that he financed himself, opened in 2015. He gave $50 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, played a pivotal role in creating the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and brokered the deal that brought to the museum Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s important collection of Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art.

He was particularly avid in acquiring works by Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly and Jeff Koons. In 2005, he paid $23.5 million for “Cubi XXVIII,” a work by the American sculptor David Smith, at that time a record auction price for a contemporary artist.

Together, the Broad Art Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which is devoted to education, science and medicine, have assets of $2.4 billion and have dispensed hundreds of millions of dollars, putting the Broads among the leading philanthropists in the United States.

“I want to give back, and I also have a big ego” Mr. Broad told Forbes magazine in 2003. “I’d rather be recognized for doing good than for just making money.”

Lester L. Wolff, a former New York Democratic congressman who championed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s and America’s fight against international drug trafficking in the ‘70s, died May 11 in Syosset, NY. He was 102.

Born in 1919, Mr. Wolff was the oldest living former member of the House of Representatives. Serving from 1965 to 1981, he co-sponsored the original Medicare law; carried a message from China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiao-ping, to President Jimmy Carter that led to full Sino-American diplomatic recognition in 1979; and helped expose Indochina’s so-called Golden Triangle as a major source of heroin destined for the United States and its troops in Vietnam.

In 1950, Mr. Wolff founded the Coordinated Marketing Agency, which placed ads for regional grocery store chains. The company prospered, and he remained chairman until 1964, when he ran for Congress. After his congressional years, he was a director on various corporate boards and a consultant on Asian affairs and international trade. For years, he commuted to Washington to interview House and Senate members for the weekly PBS public affairs program, “Ask Congress.”

Robert E. Slavin died April 24 in Baltimore, MD. He was 70. Dr. Slavin, a sociologist, helped shift the emphasis in classrooms across the country toward teaching reading through phonics, mixing students of different aptitudes rather than educating them on separate tracks, and testing them for vision and other factors that could affect their education.

Dr. Slavin was the author of two dozen books, most of which elaborated on his commitment to “evidence-based” research that substantiated the most effective teaching methods. In 2020, he was named the Johns Hopkins School of Education’s first distinguished professor.

In the last entry on his blog, Dr. Slavin wrote: “All of us go into education to solve real problems in real classrooms. Education keeps growing in techniques and capability. But it’s useful to stop from time to time and remember why we do what we do, and for whom.”

Yitzhak Arad, who as an orphaned teenage partisan fought the Germans and their collaborators during WWII, then went on to become an esteemed scholar of the Holocaust and the longtime chairman of the Yad Vashem remembrance and research center in Israel, died May 6 in a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 94.

Mr. Arad was not even bar mitzvahed when the Germans invaded Poland and what is now part of Lithuania in 1939 and began rounding up Jews, forcing them into ghettos and murdering them. His parents and 30 close family members wo8ld perish before the war ended in 1945.

Mr. Arad remained active with Yad Vashem until his last weeks. Last year, he took part in a photography exhibition about Holocaust survivors and their lives after the war. When it was his turn to speak, he confronted the audience with a hard truth born of his own ordeals. “What happened in the past,” he said, “could potentially happen again, to any people, at any time.”

Robert Hershon, a poet who as a founder of Hanging Loose Press, furthered the careers of countless other poets, died on March 20 at a hospital in Brooklyn. He was 84.

Mr. Hershon published more than a dozen collections of his own poems, works that could be amusing, touching or both. He was also godfather of sorts to many younger poets through Hanging Loose Press, a publication so informal that its editorial meetings were held in McSorley’s, an East Village bar, The New York Times said.

Hershon felt it should be the mission of small literary presses to discover and champion new voices…otherwise “What’s the point of their existence,” he said. “His preference was for poetry that didn’t take itself too seriously, but was energetic and inventive in both form and language; nothing pompous or stuffy or smelling of the library,” said the poet Mark Pawlak.