Harry M. Markowitz, an economist who launched a revolution in finance, upending traditional thinking about buying stocks and earning the Nobel Prize in economic science in 1990 for his breakthrough, died on June 29 in San Diego. He was 95.

Until Dr. Markowitz came along, the investment world assumed that the best stock-market strategy was simply to choose the shares of a group of companies that were thought to have the best prospects. But in 1952, he published his dissertation, “Portfolio Selection,” which overturned this common sense approach with what became known as modern portfolio theory.

The heart of his research was grounded in the relationship between risk and reward. He showed that the risk in a portfolio is less dependent on the riskiness of its component stocks and other assets than how they relate to one another. It was the first time that the benefits of diversification had been codified and quantified, using advanced mathematics to calculate correlations and variations from the mean.

Dr. Markowitz won renown in two other fields: “sparse matrix” techniques for solving large mathematical optimization problems, and the development of Simscript, which is used for programming computer simulations of systems like factories, transportation and communications networks. “I’m not a one-shot Nobel laureate,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.

Robert Sherman, who hosted three long-running radio shows over more than a half-century on the New York classical music station WQXR-FM, died June 27 at his home in Ossining, NY. He was 90.

Mr. Sherman had been working behind the scenes at WQXR for more than a decade before he began hosting “Woody’s Children,” a weekly folk music program in 1969. A year later, he began “The Listening Room,” a daily program featuring established and emerging musicians. And in 1978, he started “Young Artists Showcase,” a weekly show for up-and-coming musicians. That program is still on the air.

Mr. Sherman also wrote music criticism for The New York Times, hosted a music show on public television station WNET, and collaborated with Victor Borge, the comic piano virtuoso, on two books. With his brother, Alexander, he compiled a book about their mother, Nadia Reisenberg, a concert pianist.

Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, NY. He was 74.

Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which should be designated landmarks, and then persuading the landmarks commission of their worthiness. He collaborated on a report with architect Hugh Hardy that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail. In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks.

Mary Ann Hoberman, whose dozens of rhyme-filled books for children sought to encourage them to read, to read aloud, and to commit poems to memory, died on July 7 at home in Greenwich, CT. She was 92.

In a 2008 interview with the Poetry Foundation, she said that moments from her childhood were reflected in her books. “I started writing when I had children of my own,” she said, “but I wasn’t really observing them so much as remembering what it was to be a child myself.”

Lawrence Turman, who as a novice movie producer in 1963 read about a novel by a largely unknown writer named Charles Webb, took a $1,000 option on it, and set in motion the making of the landmark film “The Graduate,” died July 1 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96.

Mr. Turman had producing or executive producing credits on more than 40 feature films and television movies, but it was “The Graduate” that made his career, The New York Times said.

Once he owned the rights, it took years to get the film made. He submitted the idea to all the studios, and none liked it, he said. Finally Joseph E. Levine of Embassy Pictures, who at the time was known as “king of the schlockmeisters,” took it on. “The Graduate” turned out to be the top-grossing film of 1967. “We had lines around the block,” Mr. Turman wrote in his book, So You Want To Be A Producer. “And in those lines were some studio executives who had originally turned the picture down.”

Peter Nero, the concert pianist, born Bernard Nierow, who soared to popularity in the 1960s with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz and kept the beat for nearly six decades with albums, club and television dates, and segues into conducting pops orchestras, died on July 6 in Eustis, FL. He was 89.

Mr. Nero appeared with Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and other headliners; released 72 albums; conducted the Philly Pops for 34 years, and delivered a mix of jazz and classics to generations of fans. In 1979, Mr. Nero was named musical director and player-conductor of the Philly Pops. Audiences marveled at his ability, standing up to play the piano with one hand while conducting the orchestra with the other. He also conducted orchestras in Tulsa, Washington, South Florida, St.; Louis and other cities, often performing 100 concerts a year, The New York Times said.

Henry Kamm, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times who covered Cold War diplomacy in Europe and the Soviet Union, famine in Africa, and wars and genocide in Southeast Asia, died on July 9 in Paris. He was 98.

From the continent he had fled at 15 to escape Nazi persecution during WWII, to the killing fields of what was then known as Indochina, Mr. Kamm was “the consummate star of The Times’s foreign staff: a fast, accurate, stylish writer, fluent in five languages, with global contacts and reportorial instincts that found human dramas and historical perspectives in the day’s news,” The Times said.

In 2018, he applied for and received German citizenship — a reconciliation, of sorts, with the nation he had fled as a teenager. The archive of his papers, including some 7,000 Times articles, is held by the New York Public Library.