Robert J. Birnbaum, who as president of the New York Stock Exchange is credited with helping to navigate a major financial crisis during the U.S. stock market’s plunge on what became known as Black Monday in 1987, and who later helped design market circuit breakers to head off future panics, died on Dec. 23 at his home in Boca Raton, FL. He was 94.

Mr. Birnbaum spent his career on Wall Street as one of its most reliable stewards. After studying the mechanics of marketplaces in the mid-20th century as a member of a special team at the Securities and Exchange Commission, he helped reshape stock exchanges while presiding over the American and New York exchanges.

When U.S. stock prices fell more than 22 percent on Oct. 19, 1987, his clear public comments helped soothe investors and prevent a frenzied sell-off from continuing. In the days that followed, Mr. Birnbaum played a crucial role in bringing together the leaders of various exchanges to hash out what had happened and how such a crisis could be averted in the future.

Gerald Stern, who for three decades set the bar for courtroom ethical standards in New York State as the first administrator of its Commission on Judicial Conduct, died Jan. 6 in a hospital in the Bronx. He was 86.

Mr. Stern led the commission from its inception in 1974 through 2003, a period in which it sacked, censured or admonished some 600 judges for offenses including corruption, conflicts of interest, favoritism, improper demeanor, and proscribed political activity. Mr. Stern’s scrutiny of judicial conduct set new standards of professionalism in courts across the nation.

He also criticized prosecutors for equating indictments with convictions, in particular Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s.

Beatrice Mintz, a cancer researcher whose many groundbreaking discoveries included the crucial finding that certain cancerous cells could be tamed by contact with normal neighboring cells, without the use of harsh treatments like chemotherapy and radiation, died on Jan. 3 at her home in Elkins Park, PA.

Dr. Mintz was an embryologist whose work spanned a number of disciplines, and her pioneering contributions have proved essential in helping researchers unravel some of the complexities of how cancer operates.

An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Mintz won numerous prestigious prizes and awards. They included the National Medal of Honor for Basic Research by the American Cancer Society, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for Cancer Research, and the first March of Dimes Prize in developmental biology, which she shared with Ralph L. Brinster in 1996.

Dr. Mintz was notorious for having a demanding personality and for setting exacting standards that few others could meet. At one point, she was thinking about an endowed chair in her name that would be reserved for a female scientist, but then added that she couldn’t think of anyone who would qualify.

Former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court Miriam Naor, who spent 38 years in the justice system and served 14 years on the Supreme Court, died Jan. 24. She was 74.

Naor was born in Jerusalem in 1947 and received her law degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1980, she was appointed as a judge on the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, and in 1988 she became a judge in the Jerusalem District Court. She was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2003 and served as chief from 2015 to 2017, when she retired.

An array of politicians and government officials expressed sorrow at Naor’s sudden death. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called her “a respected jurist, careful to maintain the required balance between the variety of values in Israeli society, and to strengthen the national and Zionist character of the State of Israel.”

Cecile Klein and Edith Hodes Rose, two Jewish supercentenarians, died in the same week. Klein spent seven months as Canada’s oldest person before passing away on Jan. 13. She was 114. New Jersey’s oldest resident, Edith Hodes Rose, died on Jan. 11, at the age of 111.

Sheldon Silver, the once-indomitable leader of the New York State Assembly, whose career and reputation were undone by6 a 2015 corruption conviction, died Jan. 24. He was 77.

Mr. Silver had been incarcerated at Devens Federal Medical Center in Ayer, MA. Kristie Breshears, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, said in a statement that Mr. Silver had died at the nearby Nashoba Valley Medical Center. The cause of death was not immediately clear, but Mr. Silver had a history of cancer and chronic kidney disease, according to statements made by his lawyers in 2020.

Mr. Silver was elected to the State Assembly in 1976, and served as speaker from 1994 to 2015. His dominance crumbled early in 2015 when he was accused of accepting nearly $4 million in illicit payments in exchange for taking official actions for a cancer researcher at Columbia University and two real estate developers. Mr. Silver managed to avoid prison until 2020, when his legal maneuvers were finally exhausted, leaving him to serve a six-and-a-half-year sentence.