Lillian Schwartz, one of the first artists to mesh art, science and technology through computer-generated art, died on Oct. 12 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Early on, she experimented with watercolors, acrylics and sculptures, but turned to the computer when she was invited to join Bell Labs in the late 1960s to create films using photo filters, paint, lasers and discarded footage from science films, among other elements.

“I never really could stay with one medium,” she told the Computer History Museum. “I would always learn the traditional method and then try to push the medium to find other ways to use it.”

Arie Kopelman, the president and CEO of Chanel Inc., who with marketing savvy helped transform an old French couture house into a global luxury brand, died on Oct. 7 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

During his run, the company’s annual sales soared to $7 billion from $357 million, expanding Chanel’s accessories, eyewear, cosmetics, fragrance and skin-care lines. Previously, he spent 20 years at the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach.

In 1989, President Ronald Reagan appointed Mr. Kopelman to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He also served on numerous boards, including those of Columbia Business School, St. Bernard’s School in Manhattan, the New York City Ballet, and the Municipal Art Society.

Leon N. Cooper, a Nobel-winning physicist who helped unlock the secret of superconductivity and who did pioneering work in understanding how memory and the brain work, died on Oct. 23 at his home in Providence, RI. He was 94.

Some of the greatest physicists of thed 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Richard Feynman, tried to explain how superconductivity works. Dr. Cooper helped crack the code with two colleagues at the University of Illinois — John Bardeen and J. Robert Schrieffer. Years later, Dr. Cooper recalled that if he had known how many eminent scientists had tried and failed to solve the concept of superconductivity, he probably would not have tried.

Dr. Cooper spent most of his career at Brown University, where he became interested in neuroscience and went to work on one of the central puzzles in the field: how people learn. Among the discoveries was how people learn to see.

According to Dr. Cooper’s daughters, when he was young, he told his father that he wanted to become a physicist because “there is no other way that I can know about everything.”

Bette A. Prashker, a pioneering woman in the book business who published the feminist classics Sexual Politics by Kate Millet and Backlash by Susan Faludi, died on July 30 in Alford, MA. She was 99.

The list of authors Ms. Prashker discovered, championed or positioned for best-sellerdom as a top editor and executive at Doubleday and also Crown included Isaac Asimov, Erik Larson, Dave Barry and Dominick Dunne.

Don Buchwald, a talent agent who elevated shock-jock radio personality Howard Stern to satellite radio, died on July 22 at his home in North Egremont, MA. He was 88.

In late 1985, after WNBC fired Mr. Stern, Mr. Buchwald negotiated his move to WXRK-FM, known as K-Rock. Over the next 20 years, Mr. Stern’s popularity swelled, and his show was syndicated to stations nationwide. But it was Mr. Buchwald’s negotiating in 2004 that led to a groundbreaking five-year $500-million contract with Sirius Satellite Radio, where he could say anything he wanted, compared with traditional radio, where his sexual and scatological references led to fines by the Federal Communications Commission against stations that carried his show. The Sirius deal included 34.4 million shares of the company’s stock, which were worth $219 million, when the show made its satellite debut in early 2006.

Walter Shapiro, a political columnist whose career included stints as a presidential speechwriter, stand-up comic, professor, author and, as a recent college graduate, congressional candidate, died on July 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.

He began his career in journalism at Congressional Quarterly and went on to write for Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, The New Republic and Esquire. He later wrote for Salon, Yahoo News, Politics Daily and Roll Call.

In 2010, Mr. Shapiro won a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. At his death, he had written dozens of columns on the race between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. Their presumptive face-off was the 12th presidential campaign he had covered.

In addition to his columns, Mr. Shapiro wrote two books, one about his grifter great-uncle who may, or may not, have fooled the Nazis into buying what they thought was a cargo of nickel — and of whom Mr. Shapiro admitted he was unduly proud.

Francine Pascal, as former soap opera scriptwriter from Queens who conjured up an entire literary universe in her long-running and best-selling ”Sweet Valley High” series of young-adult novels, died on July 28 in Manhattan. She was 92.

Within a few years of its debut in 1982, “Sweet Valley High” had taken over the young-adult book market. In January 1986, 18 out of the top 20 books on the young-adult best-sellers list were “Sweet Valley High” titles. Altogether, the “Sweet Valley High” series has sold more than 200 million copies.

Although some critics panned her books’ utopian settings and fanciful plots, Ms. Pascal was unapologetic. “These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading,” she told People magazine. “I don’t know that they’re all going to go on to War and Peace, but we have created readers out of nonreaders. If they go on to Harlequin romances, so what? They’re going to read.”