Liselotte Gorlin, who died Thursday at 91, was a tutor of mathematics and physics whose students included the children of diplomats, business executives, and art patrons.

Born in France, Gorlin moved to New York in 1940, where she became a tutor to “enumerable” students, relatives said. They included schoolchildren at the Lycée Français on the Upper East Side, and she also taught the children of parents whose names appeared regularly in the society pages.

Last year, dozens of former students traveled to New York from across the country and from Israel to celebrate her 90th birthday. The celebration took place at Va Bene, a restaurant on the Upper East Side. “Loads of students came,” Gorlin’s daughter, Danièle Gorlin Lassner, said.

“She gave more than just lessons,” Mrs. Lassner, a former dean of admissions at the Ramaz School, said. “She taught them a way of life.”

Among Gorlin’s students were relatives of the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud; the children of Haitian leader Paul Magloire, and the children of the Simon & Schuster executive who created the Little Golden Books series, Georges Duplaix. She also tutored the gallery owner, Guy Wildenstein, and the Houston oil heiress, Christophe de Menil, Mrs. Lassner said. In addition to the baked goods she often shared with her students, Gorlin’s popularity was fueled by a certain passion for mathematics, Mrs. Lassner said, recalling her mother asking her, “Don’t you see the poetry in numbers?”

Liselotte Samuel was born October 17, 1916, in Strasbourg, France. In 1937, she married Boris Gorlin, whom she met at a jamboree. The two were active in the French Jewish scouting movement, Eclaireuses et Eclaireurs Israelites de France-EEIF.

During World War II, Gorlin opened her home in the South of France to refugee children whose parents were concerned that Paris would be bombed. Three weeks before the Nazis invaded Paris, Gorlin and Mrs. Lassner, then 2 years old, fled Europe for America. When their ship docked in New York, they were met by Boris Gorlin, who had traveled to America a year earlier to purchase airplane parts for France’s war effort.

In New York, Boris Gorlin became an engineer and his wife took up private tutoring. Mrs. Lassner said her mother’s “special gift” was to “make math accessible and to make it easy for people.”

She recalled her mother’s tendency to compute even the most mundane sums. “When you went to the supermarket with my mother, even before the tab was up, she would tell you, ‘I think I have this amount,'” her daughter said. “She was always right.”

An elegant woman with an affinity for Hermès scarves, Gorlin and her late husband, a past president of Manhattan’s Congregation Orach Chaim who passed away in 1995, enjoyed entertaining. “They would catch people who were walking the wrong way,” Mrs. Lassner said. “They pulled them in to eat at their house.” Gorlin enjoyed baking and she often made fresh fruit tarts for her friends and guests.

In recent months, she suffered from cardiac and pulmonary ailments. She died Thursday at Mount Sinai Hospital, Mrs. Lassner said.

Gorlin is survived by two children, Danièle Gorlin Lassner and her husband, Jules Lassner, and Dr. Jacques Gorlin and his wife, Susan Gorlin. She is also survived by six grandchildren and 13 great grandchildren.