Albert Madansky, a virtuoso statistician who sought to quantify the risks of accidental nuclear war, died on Dec. 8 in Chicago. He was 88.

In 1959, in the thick of the Cold War, Dr. Madansky was a mathematician for the RAND Corporation, the research institute in Santa Monica, CA, where with colleagues he studied the risk of unauthorized nuclear explosion.

Noting that any risk co7ld have serious consequences, his report recommended what became known as Permissive Action Links, which required the installation of coded safety locks on nuclear weapons and missiles and the approval of a minimum of two individuals to launch a nuclear attack. Upgraded versions of the Permissive Action Links system are still in use by the American military.

In 1976, in collaboration with Martin Shubik, an American economist, Dr. Madansky released what may have been his most controversial statistical conclusion: The results of a blind taste-test of pastrami and corned beef sandwiches. Perhaps inspired by his earlier research into nuclear weapons, Dr. Madansky pointed out that Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda was a vital ingredient for gastronomical implosion.

“It’s catalytic action when combined with pastrami in the stomach is that of an atomic bomb,” Dr. Madansky wrote. “Varoom, and the pastrami disintegrates, is digested, and its heart-burning power is released in full.”

Dr. Beryl Benacerraf, a radiologist  who revolutionized the diagnosis of fetal abnormalities like Down syndrome through the use of ultrasound technology, died on Oct. 1, at her home in Cambridge, MA. She was 73.

Dr. Benacerraf, who was a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology and radiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, discovered that a thickening patch of skin at the back of a fetus’s neck, known as the nuchal fold, was associated with Down syndrome and other chromosomal disorders.

In the course of her four-decade career, Dr. Benacerraf saw tens of thousands of patients while publishing hundreds of journal articles and several books.

Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s considerable royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.

Peter Yarrow, Mr. Lipton’s classmate at Cornell, put the lyrics to music and in 1963, he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it. The song was such an immediate and lasting hit that it allowed Mr. Lipton to leave his job and move to California, where he sought out a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.

The royalties from “Puff” allowed him to explore stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology. Ultimately, he accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D, which seeded the emergence of a new generation of filmmaking. Today, some 30,000- movie screens across the United States use 3-D  techniques that evolved from Mr. Lipton’s innovations, The New York Times said.

Helen (Halina) Silber, who attributed surviving the Holocaust to her transfer from Auschwitz to an ammunition and enamelware factory owned by the German industrialist, Oskar Schindler, died on Oct. 25 in Baltimore. She was 93.

Arriving at Auschwitz at the outset of WWII, she told the members of the Young Israel Shomrai Emunah synagogue in 2019, “I saw endless rows and rows of barbed wire. I could smell the stench of burning flesh…There is no room here for miracles.”

But she was selected to work in Schindler’s factory, and ended up as No. 16 on Schindler’s list of the hundreds he helped to escape. Speaking in 2015 at a Holocaust Remembrance Day event at a Maryland school, she said “You are the last generation to hear of our suffering and the miracles by which we survived the Holocaust. Many of the survivors have passed away and so, when the rest of us will be gone, we hope you will keep reminding the world of our past.”

She spent the final years of her life speaking to groups about the lessons of her long and remarkable life.

Gerald Stern, who drew on Nature, history and his own experiences to write prizewinning poetry laced with wistfulness, anger and humor died on Oct. 28 in the Bronx. He was 97.

Mr. Stern, whose “This Time: New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award for poetry in 1998, came to poetic prominence relatively late; his first published poem , “The Pineys,” appeared in The Journal of the Rutgers University Library in 1969, when he was 44. His first collection “Rejoicings,” was published in 1973, when he was nearing 50.

His second collection, “Lucky Life,” was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the year’s best poetry book, and was described when published in 1977 as “a cornerstone in American poetry” by Tayve Neese in the Web Del Sol Review of Books.

Over the years, he would teach at a number of institutions, including Pitt, Columbia, New York and Princeton universities and Sarah Lawrence College. Mr. Stern retired from teaching in the mid-1990s. In 2010, he received the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, his “Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992” received the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. Mr. Stern’s most recent poetry collection, “Blessed As We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018, was published in 2020.

Sy Presten, a press agent who supplied gags and gossip to newspaper columnists for three-quarters of a century, died on Oct. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.

His was an era when national attention was focused on New York theater, sports and nightlife. Readers wanted to know what was happening at the Stork Club and the Copacabana. The proprietors of those establishments used Mr. Presten as their press agent, who would gin up publicity for major figures there, like Kate Smith and Charles Revson and Elizabeth Taylor watching Sammy Davis Jr. at the Copa.

According to The New York Times, until the end of his life, Mr. Presten remained haunted by a rare lapse in his never-ending hustle. About 10 years ago, the gossip columnist Liz Smith invited him out to lunch at a nice restaurant near her home. She refused to let him pay. According to the dogma of zealous press agentry, the event constituted blasphemy. “He was talking about it to his dying day,” his wife said. “He wanted to pick up that check.”

Gael Greene, who reinvented the art of the restaurant review with sass and sensuality in four decades as New York magazine’s restaurant critic, died on Nov. 1 at her home in an assisted living facility in Manhattan. She was 88.

Until her death, Ms. Greene was chairwoman of Citymeals on Wheels, a New York charity she helped create in the early 1980s to provide food for the elderly.

She embarked on her assignment for New York with great flair. A fan of the New Journalism, she put a premium on lively prose and colorful detail, throwing overboard the pompousness of the professional gourmets who dominated the profession. She cast an amused eye over her surroundings and shared the pleasures of her plate with enthusiasm, scrutinizing the tables and offerings at renowned restaurants like La Grenouille and 21.

“I wake every day full of hope that I will discover some great new restaurant of a glorious new dish or even an enchanting new flavor,” Ms. Greene wrote in an autobiographical note for the reference work Contemporary Authors. “I have dedicated myself to the wanton indulgence of my senses. And I shall consider it fitting and divine if on my deathbed my last words echo those of Pierrette the sister of Brillat-Savarin, who died at table shortly before her one-hundredth birthday: ‘Bring on the dessert. I think I’m about to die.’”