In Passing: Leonard D. Eron, studied TV violence

Leonard D. Eron, a psychologist whose 50 years of research led him to warn society that children who watched violent television shows tend to show aggressive and destructive behavior later in life, died May 3 of congestive heart failure at his home in Lindenhurst, Ill. He was 87.

Aggression is a learned behavior, Eron determined, and watching violent TV shows, including cartoons, makes violence seem normal to children.

These conclusions, not without controversy in the television industry, grew out of a long-term study of 800 people from upstate New York who were third-graders in 1960. He followed up with them 10 years later, 20 years later and 40 years later, in 2000. The study is ongoing.

His findings have been widely cited and duplicated over the years, and he testified multiple times before Congress. He published seven books and more than 100 professional articles, and was chairman of the American Psychological Association’s Commission on Violence and Youth.

P.G. de Gennes, pioneered the LCD

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, 74, a Nobel Prize-winning French physicist who was known for research that led to modern liquid-crystal displays and whose broad interests included studies that improved the growing of grapes for wine, died May 18 near Paris.

The ubiquitous liquid-crystal displays, which consume little energy but offer bright readouts of information on matters ranging from the price of a soda to the time of day to the most intricate technological process, are said to owe much to de Gennes’ pioneering theoretical work.

Capable of flowing like fluids but retaining a fixed structure reminiscent of solids, liquid crystals, with their oxymoronic name, have been described as an “in-between” state of matter. Their sensitivity to their environment gives them their usefulness in displays.

Current ability to exploit liquid crystals got a big boost from work by de Gennes and colleagues in Paris in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the frontiers of atomic and molecular physics.

He explained what happens at the crucial times and places of transition, in which the geometric orderliness of molecules in crystals turns into the unruly disorder of molecules in liquids. This contribution to basic science helped him win the 1991 Nobel Prize.

Roy DeForest, Bay Area artist

Roy DeForest, a painter often associated with the Bay Area Funk artists who captured attention in the 1960s for their cartoon-like images, pop-culture themes and Dadaist-style irony, has died. He was 77.

DeForest, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis, died Friday at Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center after a brief illness, according to Claudia Morain of the UC Davis public information office. The family did not know the exact cause of his death.

DeForest painted densely packed compositions filled with images of birds, barnyard animals, humans and other figures, some of them ominous looking.

His work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and moved to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.