Fred Eversley, a sculptor who used a technique dating back to Isaac Newton to make otherworldly discs of tinted resin, died on March 14 in Manhattan. He was 83.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Maria Larsson, who said that he died after a brief illness.

Mr. Eversley was a Brooklyn schoolboy of 12 or 13 when he first learned, from an issue of Popular Mechanics, that the centrifugal force created by spinning a vessel of liquid will push its surface into a parabola. Newton did this with a bucket and a rope; Mr. Eversley, working in his parents’ basement, used a pie plate of Jell-O on a turntable.

When he returned to the idea nearly three decades later, after giving up a career as an engineer, he was a fledgling sculptor in the busy artists’ community of Venice Beach, Calif., experimenting with plastics and dye. Using liquid polyester, which he called “the cheapest, the least toxic and the most transparent” resin available, he worked out a process for casting separate layers of resin colored violet, amber and blue in a spinning cylindrical mold.

The result was a form he stuck to for the next 55 years: a translucent disc, somewhat bigger than a vinyl record and much thicker, displayed vertically on a pedestal. Each disc has a highly polished parabolic concavity on one side that creates optical effects like a lens, sharpening and minimizing the view behind it. At the same time, the colors sparkle and change dramatically, according to the light in a given room and a viewer’s movements; as Mr. Eversley liked to say, it becomes a kind of kinetic sculpture without kinetic elements.

Over the years, Mr. Eversley produced opaque as well as translucent discs, worked at different scales, and made other parabolas by slicing through resin rings and tubes at sharp angles. Steadily successful at winning public commissions, he installed soaring curves of futuristic steel or glowing polyurethane at Miami International Airport, in West Palm Beach, Fla., and at the southern end of Central Park.

A charming and self-possessed man, he also acquired friends, mentors and patrons wherever he went. He used the sculptor Charles Mattox’s lathe to spin his first mold, was introduced to the gallerist Leo Castelli by Robert Rauschenberg and, according to his wife, became close friends with the influential collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza after encountering him in an elevator.

Early on, he showed his work with other members of what became known as the Light and Space movement, an ethereal California spin on Minimalism. He was also associated with Finish Fetish, a movement that emphasizes new materials and the labor-intensive perfection of surfaces, and he was occasionally grouped with the Black Arts Movement, though some other Black artists found his work insufficiently political. (He made his first opaque disc after the sculptor John McCracken jokingly handed him a can of black pigment with which to make some “black art.”)

Still, with his engineering background, Mr. Eversley thought about what he was doing differently from how his peers did. His abiding interest was energy, in the scientific sense. And his abiding love was the only shape that, whatever hits it, whether light or sound, throws everything back into a single focal point: the parabola.

Frederick John Eversley was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 28, 1941. His father, Frederick William Eversley Jr., was an aerospace engineer and a contractor; his mother, Beatrice (Syphax) Eversley, taught at an elementary school. His paternal grandmother was Jewish, and his maternal grandmother was a member of the Shinnecock Nation.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by three younger siblings, Rani, Donald and Thomas Eversley.

As a child, Mr. Eversley liked to listen in on his father’s conversations with other engineers and to experiment with his grandfather’s camera equipment. He attended the progressive Camp Kinderland in Massachusetts; worked at the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village as a teenager as well as for his father’s aviation company; graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School; and met jazz greats like John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald at the Putnam Central Club, which his grandfather had founded, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

He was the first Black man to live on campus at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, then known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In his senior year, the father of a fraternity brother offered him a job at Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, Calif. He had already been accepted to medical school. But then he began dating a painting student with plans to spend the summer in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

“It’s a long story,” he recalled in a 2022 interview with the art historian Danielle O’Steen for the monograph “Fred Eversley: Parabolic Lenses,” “but my liberal parents suddenly turned on me and thought my idea was too wild. They refused to help out with money, so I figured the only way to spend the summer of ’63 in Mexico with Suzanne was to accept the job at Wyle and ask for advance payment.”

That fall he moved to Venice Beach and began running tests for NASA, private companies and the Department of Defense, like designing a special test chamber that bombarded the Apollo space capsule with high-intensity noise.

His plans were derailed again by a serious automobile accident in January 1967 that left him temporarily unable to work. By then he was surrounded by artists like James Turrell, whose studio was down the block; Richard Diebenkorn, whose studio was visible from his apartment; and Mr. McCracken, who moved in next door. Many of them came to him for help with engineering problems.

“Since I was on disability payment,” Mr. Eversley explained in the monograph, “I could play freely, without any pressure around staying out of the Army or making my living. I guess I felt like, if others can make art, I can, too. I really had nothing to lose.”

He started with photographic transparencies attached to the sides of plastic cubes illuminated by fluorescent bulbs. But soon, with the encouragement of friends like Mr. Mattox, John Altoon and Robert Rauschenberg, he dropped the photographs and focused on the plastic, casting and polishing luminous rectangles and cones. In 1969, when Mr. Altoon died, Mr. Eversley took over his studio, which had been designed by Frank Gehry.

Soon Mr. Eversley was enjoying a debut few artists could dream of. On a single day in 1970 he sold two pieces directly to the painter and influential gallerist Betty Parsons and was offered a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Marcia Tucker, with whom he had worked at the Folklore Center. That year he also had several solo shows at commercial galleries in New York, Chicago and Newport Beach, Calif., and appeared in more than a dozen group shows, including one at Pace Gallery in New York and one in Tokyo as well as several in California.

Despite this explosive beginning, for much of his career Mr. Eversley was, and had to be, his own best salesman. Fortunately, though he might have downplayed it, he had a talent for it.

“I really don’t believe, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, that my business techniques are that aggressive,” he said in a 1980 interview with Ocular magazine.

In 2018 he signed with David Kordansky Gallery, which has locations in Los Angeles and New York. The next year, after a yearslong dispute with his Venice Beach landlord, he returned to New York, where he owned a five-story loft building in SoHo. In 2023 Kordansky staged his first New York solo show since 1976, “Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses.” For that show, he made a series of brilliantly colored seven- to nine-foot-tall monoliths, realizing an idea he first had decades earlier. Amanda Gluibizzi described them in The Brooklyn Rail as “megalithic and space-age at the same time.”

Shortly before his death, said Ms. Larsson, an architect who also managed her husband’s studio, Mr. Eversley was talking about what a charmed life he had had. If he did, it must have been at least partly because he came forward so eagerly to meet every opportunity.

“Fred showed up,” Ms. Larsson said. “He showed up everywhere. He used to say, ‘Maria, we need to show up.’”

Six years ago, with crime rates at historic lows and Democratic progressivism on the rise, New York State began requiring prosecutors to turn over reams of evidence to defense lawyers well before a trial.

The goal was to level the playing field for criminal defendants, who often took plea deals without understanding the full scope of the case being built against them.

But many of the state’s district attorneys say that their offices have struggled to comply with the new requirements and blame them in part for an increase in case dismissals, which rose 22 percentage points in New York City.

They have urged state leaders to consider changing the so-called discovery rules, and have won over a powerful ally, Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The governor, a Democrat, is backing a measure that would ease the consequences for prosecutors if they do not share evidence in a timely manner. Her proposal would also let them redact information without a judge’s permission.

Ms. Hochul has said her plan will improve processing times and solve the problem of dismissals “based on technicalities that can prohibit justice to victims and the people of the State of New York.”

Ms. Hochul’s embrace of the issue reflects a broader shift in the priorities of politicians in New York and across the nation. In recent elections, Republicans have made gains by tarring Democrats with accusations that they are soft on crime. New York’s leaders have sensed the shifting winds and grasped for ways to show voters they are taking their public safety concerns seriously. Not only prosecutors but liberal power brokers like the Rev. Al Sharpton back Ms. Hochul’s ideas.

“There is a swing back toward pragmatism on how we approach the criminal justice problem,” said Lee Kindlon, a Democrat and Albany’s district attorney, who was a defense lawyer before taking office in the fall. “The politics have changed.”

Ms. Hochul’s requests, which were included in her executive budget proposal this year, have alarmed defense lawyers. Her efforts would return New York to the days when prosecutors would face no consequences for waiting until the day of trial to share evidence, depriving defendants of the chance to mount an informed defense, they said. Prosecutors, they say, will revert to withholding material.

Eli Northrup, policy director of the criminal defense practice for the Bronx Defenders, disputed prosectors’ arguments, saying that cases “can’t get dismissed on a ‘technicality.’”

“I understand the broader complaint of cases shouldn’t go away,” Mr. Northrup said. “But it’s the responsibility of a government that is bringing charges against somebody to bring documents.”

Changes to the discovery law will be part of broader budget negotiations among the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly, who are both Democrats and have expressed discomfort with some changes. Both chambers recently left the government’s proposals out of their budget counteroffers.

Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Senate majority leader, said they should discuss the subject later outside budget talks. Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said he was open to changing the law but was concerned about giving prosecutors total discretion.

“We would rather let the judge be the actual arbiter,” Mr. Heastie said.

Broad changes to the criminal justice system were approved in 2019. At the time, New York was one of 10 states that allowed prosecutors to wait until the eve of trial to hand over crucial evidence.

The new discovery law was a major win for defendants, who had helped draft the measure. But prosecutors say they now have to devote hundreds of hours to collecting materials they say are only tangentially related to a case.

Prosecutors have said that judges regularly dismiss cases because of minor mistakes in supplying evidence, a process known by the legal term discovery. The remedy should be proportional and not result in automatic dismissals for violating the Constitution’s speedy trial requirement, they have said.

Only 5 percent of misdemeanor and felony cases in criminal court in New York City were dismissed because of speedy trial violations in 2019, according to state court data. In 2024, that number had jumped to 31 percent.

Prosecutors insist that their goal is not to roll back the 2019 law.

Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, said that he supports lawmakers making “common-sense adjustments to the statute to protect victims of crime.” The changes would keep the state’s laws “the most open and transparent discovery laws in the nation,” he said.

Darcel Clark, the Bronx district attorney, recently told lawmakers that she “championed the transformation.” Prosecutors, she added, want “minor revisions to help for the things that were the unintended consequences.”

Amanda Jack, policy director at the Legal Aid Society, said that the governor’s support, along with that of New York City’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, and mayor, Eric Adams, has given the prosecutors’ mission momentum.

Ms. Hochul said this month that unease about safety changed people’s attitudes about discovery laws “dramatically.”

“I am just trying to solve the problem,” she said, adding that “the pendulum swings, and you start seeing the impact.”

The coach of a high school girls’ basketball team from a community in New York’s Adirondacks was fired after he pulled a player’s ponytail at the end of a state championship game on Friday, the school district confirmed.

Videos on social media and local television news show an older man yanking a distraught player’s hair, talking emphatically and scolding her while another player attempts to separate the two.

The hair pulling happened after the team for the Northville Central School District lost to LaFargeville Central School District in the Class D New York State championship game.

The district in Northville, which is in Fulton County about 60 miles northwest of Albany and on Great Sacandaga Lake, said that it was “deeply disturbed” by the conduct of its coach and that the “individual will no longer be coaching” for the district.

The statement did not say that the coach had been fired, but Sarah Chauncey, the district superintendent, said in a phone interview on Saturday that the coach’s “service with the district has been terminated.”

Dr. Chauncey declined to confirm the identities of the coach or player.

According to MaxPreps, a website that tracks high school sports rosters, the head coach for the team is Jim Zullo. The player appears to be a high school senior based on her jersey number.

In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Zullo, who coached the team for the past two years, apologized to the player, her family, the team, the school district and the community.

“I deeply regret my behavior following the loss to LaFargeville Friday night in the Class D state championship game,” he said, adding: “As a coach, under no circumstance is it acceptable to put my hands on a player, and I am truly sorry. I wish I could have those moments back.”

Mr. Zullo told News10 ABC that before the episode, the player had directed an expletive at him when he instructed her to shake hands with the opposing team.

Alyssa Leroux, 31, of Watertown, N.Y., was watching the broadcast of the game with her family on Friday. The placement of the team from LaFargeville, which is about 90 miles north of Syracuse, in the championship was a “big deal” in the community, she said.

At the very end of the game, as Northville’s six-point loss was finalized, she thought she saw something strange. Then she got a text from a friend who asked her if she “saw that coach pull that girl’s hair.”

She replayed the broadcast and confirmed it. Aghast, Ms. Leroux wanted to draw attention to it. She took a video from the television showing the episode and posted it to Facebook.

Her video so far has gained 500 reactions — most of them angry emojis — and nearly 900 shares. It was also featured in local news reports

“I just felt terrible for the girl,” Ms. Leroux said. “I mean she just played her heart out.”

“You can’t do things like that when you’re an older man with a young kid,” she added.