Andrew Gross, a member of a prominent New York apparel family who abandoned a career in the so-called rag trade to write nearly 20 crime and political thrillers, including five with James Patterson that hit No. 1 on The New York Times best-sellers list, died April 9 at his home in Purchase, NY. He was 72.

Mr. Gross was a grandson of Fred P. Pomerantz, the founder of Leslie Fay Inc., whose dresses and sportswear were being sold in more than 13,000 stores around the country when Mr. Pomerantz died in 1986. For a time, Mr. Gross served as senior corporate vice president of the company, until he announced to his wife and three children that he wanted to write a novel. Although the finished novel was never sold, the work came to the attention of Mr. Paterson.

In 2018, Mr. Gross published what he considered his most personal work, Button Man, loosely autobiographical, about a man from a poor Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who fight his way up the corporate ladder and into conflict with mobsters. “It is a tribute to my grandfather,” Mr. Gross told Publishers Weekly, referring to Mr. Pomerantz. “He was as tough as any gangster, single-minded and driven. He set a high bar for himself, and he succeeded.”

Joel Krosnick, the longtime cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, who helped shape its championing of new American music as much as its commitment to the classics, died on April 15 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. He was 84.

Mr. Krosnick joined the Juilliard in 1974 and remained until his retirement in 2016. With his longtime musical partner, the pianist Gilbert Kalish, Mr. Krosnick also had an active solo career, giving recitals in the United States and Europe.

Robert B. Shapiro, as former law professor turned corporate executive who performed a marketing miracle by branding aspartame as the sugar substitute NutraSweet, and making it a household name that consumers demanded in thousands of products, died on May 2 at his home in Chicago. He was 86.

Aspartame was invented by chemists at the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle. In 1985, Searle sold $700 million worth of aspartame, identified as NutraSweet, to dieters and others wanting to avoid sugar. The product has no calories and, in spite of its name, no essential nutritional value,

Margot Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor who, after decades in New York City, returned in 2010 to Berlin, where she found new purpose as a champion of Holocaust remembrance, died on May 9 in Berlin. She was 103.

Mrs. Friedländer and her husband arrived in New York in 1946, vowing never to return to the country that had murdered their families. But after her husband’s death, Mrs. Friedländer decided to go back to see what was left. She had signed up for a memoir-writing class, and had begun to tell her story, which was becoming a memoir. A filmmaker heard about the memoir, and he encouraged her to return to Berlin, where she found her voice. She traveled to schools and talked to young people about how she had survived before her capture and her time at Theresienstadt in Bohemia.

Charles Louis Strouse, an American composer and lyricist best known for writing the music to the Broadway musicals Bye Bye Birdie for which he won his first Tony Award for Best Musical,  Applause, which gave him his second Tony Award,  and Annie, his third,  died on May 15 in Manhattan, at 96.

Annie, which included the song, “Tomorrow,” which quickly became a song hit and, in addition to his third Tony Award, garnered him two Grammy Awards. Strouse won Emmy Awards for music for television. He was also the recipient of the 1999 ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers Award, and the Oscar Hammerstein Award. He became a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame in and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

His happy childhood memories later inspired the credits roll for “All In The Family” in which Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton sit at the piano, singing together.

Peter Lax, whose work at the intersection of mathematical theory and application redefined how scientists used new computing technology to solve the technical problems of the Cold War, from designing aircraft and weapons to predicting the weather, died on May 16 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

As the computer age was dawning, Dr. Lax, a native of Hungary, led the way in figuring out how the new technology could be harnessed to mathematics for the purpose of analyzing complex phenomena in nature, technology and warfare. His theoretical breakthroughs and his leadership in developing large-scale computing infrastructure produced new ways to characterize and predict phenomena as varied as storm fronts, shock waves and stock prices.

“Mathematics is a broad subject,” he said. “It is true that nobody can know it all, or even nearly all. It is also true that as mathematics develops, things are simplified and unusual connections appear.”