Herbert Saffir, 90, an engineer who created the five-category system used to describe hurricane strength and warn millions of a storm’s danger, died Wednesday at South Miami Hospital of complications from surgery, said his son, Richard Saffir.
A structural engineer, Saffir created his scale in 1969, laying out for the first time what kind of damage could be expected from a hurricane. It has since become the definitive way to describe intensity.
Saffir’s scale was expanded by former National Hurricane Center director Robert Simpson and became known as the Saffir-Simpson scale in the 1970s. Simpson, 95, said this year that he had a hard time before the scale explaining the damage a storm could cause.
“I couldn’t tell the Salvation Army, for example, how much and what materials they should be shipping. The scale gave them a much better handle on that,” Simpson said.
Samuel L. Leonard, 101, a zoologist at Cornell University whose studies of reproductive hormones in animals helped prepare the foundation for in vitro fertilization in women, died Nov. 11 in Ithaca, N.Y.
Leonard was still a graduate student when he began his studies of sex hormones, produced at the base of the brain in the pituitary gland.
In the 1930s, Leonard, then a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin working with F.L. Hisaw, his thesis adviser, and H.L. Fevold, determined that the pituitary actually produces two hormones with distinct effects on the sexual organs.
The findings went against a theory that held that there was only a single hormone involved. The results “created a storm that opened a series of investigations and fruitful research,” said Robert H. Foote, a professor emeritus of animal physiology at Cornell.
Maurice Bejart, 80, a French choreographer whose flamboyant ballets made him a star in Europe, died Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland.
His work left virtually no one indifferent. He attracted adulation from mass audiences and skepticism from some critics who doubted his ability.
His “Firebird” was embodied by a Vietcong guerrilla rising up like a phoenix. In his “Bolero,” Ravel’s score accompanied the increasing sexual tension of men reaching toward a woman dancing atop a table. Later, Bejart substituted a male soloist surrounded by men.
