Henry Orenstein, a Holocaust survivor who went on to invent the Transformers toys and became a major donor to Jewish and Israeli causes, died Dec. 14. He was 98.

Orenstein became a best-selling toymaker with his Transformers line, which he first created in the early 1980s. He brought the idea to Hasbro, which first produced the toys in 1984. The toys would become one of the most successful action figures in history, spawning TV shows, movies and merchandise worth billions of dollars.

He followed up on that success with numerous other inventions and more than 100 patents before becoming a star poker player and being inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2008. He said he was attracted to the game for the way it hinged on calling bluffs and weighing odds.

Allan Rechtschaffen, a sleep researcher at the University of Chicago died on Nov. 29 at his home in Chicago. He was 93.

Dr. Rechtschaffen tested the effects of sleep deprivation, studied dreaming, narcolepsy, napping and insomnia, and standardized the measurement of sleep stages. REM and other aspects of sleep became the focus of his career. In 1958, he was named director of the university’s sleep research laboratory, where his experiments on animals and humans over the next 41 years helped him define a challenge that he described this way: “If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the biggest mistake evolution ever made.”

Even after his retirement in 2001, he continued to search for the reason people sleep. “The question of the function of sleep has not been solved,” he said. “We have a lot of leads about what the function of sleep might be. But we haven’t nailed it down. A third of our lives still remains for the most part a mystery.”

Shirley Zussman, a sex therapist who was trained by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, the researchers who demystified the mechanics of sex, died Dec. 4 at her home in Manhattan. She was 107.

Shirley Zussman and her husband Leon trained at the Masters and Johnson Institute, and by the mid-‘70s were co-directors of the Human Sexuality Center at Long Island Jewish-Hillside Medical Center.

“Shirley was a pioneer in sex therapy and an excellent role model,” said Ruth Westheimer, who was a program director at Planned Parenthood and studying sexuality at Columbia University when she took a course in sex therapy taught by Dr. Zussman and her husband at their Long Island clinic. It was the first experience with the discipline for Dr. Westheimer, the buoyant Holocaust survivor and sexologist who later became a familiar face on television. “They were trailblazers, because she was a therapist and her husband was a gynecologist, and that validated the work,” she said.

“Men and women want intimacy,” Dr. Zussman said. “They want closeness. They want understanding. They want comfort. And they want somebody who really cares about them beyond going to bed with them. And I think people are always seeking that in every generation.”

Alan Lapidus, a New York architect with a playful style who designed large hotels and casinos, died on Oct. 15 at his home in Naples, Maine. He was 85.

Mr. Lapidus’s legacy includes the towering Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan, which was designed to evoke a bedazzled Wurlitzer jukebox; the now-demolished Trump Plaza Hotel and casino in Atlantic City; the Caesars Palace hotel and casino complex in Las Vegas; and the Hilton hotel at Walt Disney World near Orlando, FL.

Mr. Lapidus did not try to outdo his father, Morris Lapidus, whose architectural motto was “Too much is never enough.” But he followed his advice, designing palatial lodgings and capacious gambling halls to create “participatory theater,” he wrote, in which guests could “indulge and fulfill their fantasies.”

Mort Sahl, who delivered biting social commentary in the guise of a stand-up comedian and thus changed the nature of stand-up comedy and social commentary, died Oct. 26 at his home in Mill Valley, CA. He was 94.

An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine, he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right thing for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”

Mr. Sahl was a shock to the comedy system. Other comedians would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were hungry for challenge. He was their flagbearer.

Mimi Levin Lieber, a pioneer in the use of focus groups to shape product development and marketing at some of the country’s largest companies, and later a stalwart advocate for early childhood literacy in New York, died on Oct. 16 in Manhattan. She was 93.

She would gather a few randomly selected people around a table and talk to them about their choices in personal hygiene, underwear or dating preferences. She would then share these insights with corporate clients, like Hanes and General Mills. For 30 years, she provided a steady guide to companies trying to stay ahead of the rapidly shifting American consumer.

In 1981, Jerrold Nadler, then a member of the New York State Assembly (and now a U.S. representative) nominated her to the New York Board of Regents. She spent much of her time on the board pushing for more funding for low-income schools. She left the board in 1996 and founded Literacy Inc., a nonprofit that promotes reading in lower-income neighborhoods in New York. Today the group, known as LINC, works with dozens of schools and public libraries across the city.

Pauline Bart, a feminist sociologist who wrote with rigor about gender inequities in healthcare and violence against women, died on Oct. 8 at a hospice facility in Raleigh, NC. She was 91.

Dr. Bart documented the ways in which society’s gender biases had harmed women. While teaching women’s studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, Dr. Bart began to focus on rape because so many of her female students told her they had been assaulted, many by men they knew.

Dr. Bart was the co-editor with Eileen Geil Moran of Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints (1993), and the co-author with Patricia H. O’Brien of Stopping Rape: Successful Survival Strategies (1985). She and Linda Frankel wrote The Student Sociologist’s Handbook, first published in 1971.