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Yvonne Brill, a brilliant rocket scientist, dies at 88

 
Published April 14, 2013

Yvonne Brill, 88, a brilliant rocket scientist who suspended a promising career to raise three children and then returned to work full time and invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits, died of breast cancer on March 27 in Princeton, N.J. President Barack Obama presented her the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011.

Paul Williams, 64, a writer and critic who founded the alternative pop music magazine Crawdaddy, one of the first outlets for serious writing about rock music, died of complications of early onset dementia on March 27 in Encinitas, Calif.

Ed Fisher, 86, whose culturally savvy cartoons, featured in the New Yorker for nearly 50 years, made wry sport of modern life, died of advanced dementia on April 3 in Canaan, Conn. The magazine published more than 700 of his cartoons, the first in 1951, the last in 2000.

Lawrence McKiver, 97, a founder and the longtime lead singer of the McIntosh County Shouters, a Georgia group representing the last community in America to perform the traditional ring shout — a centuries-old black form of ecstatic worship that marries singing, percussion and movement — died on March 25 on St. Simons Island, Ga.

Paolo Soleri, 93, a visionary architect who was best known as the designer and oracle of Arcosanti, a settlement in the Arizona high desert that became a symbol of hippie-era utopianism, died Tuesday in Paradise Valley, Ariz.