Murray Geller

1934 - 2013

April 26, 1934 - November 27, 2013 Murray Geller, 79, of Henderson, Nevada, passed away peacefully at St. Rose Hospital at 8:45 a.m. on November 27th, 2013. "Mo," as he was affectionately known, was born in Brooklyn, NY, on April 26th, 1934 to Aaron and Yetta Geller. He attended New Utrecht High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in Mathematics and Chemistry from Brooklyn College (where he was Phi Beta Kappa), and attended graduate school at Northwestern University, where he earned his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry at the age of 24. He declined a Fulbright award in order to accept a post-doctoral position at the University of Paris as a recipient of a National Science Foundation grant. He was a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Chemistry Society and Mensa. Fresh out of graduate school, Mo taught Physics and Great Books at Howard University (quickly growing a beard in order to appear older than his students!), after which he joined the staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech in Pasadena California, first in the Chemistry section and later as an esteemed member of the Planetary Atmospheres section. As a research scientist, he presented his research at conferences around the world, publishing approximately 40 papers in a variety of disciplines. As Deputy Leader of the International Halley Watch, he supervised a global team of scientists devoted to the return of Halley's Comet in 1986. He remained at JPL doing research in theoretical chemistry, quantum mechanics, spectroscopy and mathematics for the remainder of his career, over 35 years. Like many scientists, Mo had a renegade streak: he was, on many occasions, kicked out of Las Vegas casinos for successfully counting cards (and steadily winning) all afternoon; as an elderly man he was almost kicked out of his assisted living for smoking in all the wrong areas, despite their having built a smoking pavilion just for him. Over the years, besides gambling and smoking, Mo enjoyed a range of hobbies such as golf, travel, recreational math, diagram-less crossword puzzles and extreme sudoku. He was a lover of classical music, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and all things chocolate. His more esoteric hobbies included: being the first -along with his dear friend Stan Cornyn- to independently collect the entire Scott's stamp collection, an endeavor that took them five years to complete, and creating an anagrammatic dictionary of the English language by hand, without the use of a computer, a solo effort that took him a good many more years than that. (He was inspired to create his dictionary after hearing the word "rust" at JPL and realizing that it contained four consecutive letters in the English language, which order amidst the world's relative chaos he found "beautiful.") Mo is survived by: his second wife and companion of 18 years, Barbara Delarm Martin of Henderson NV; his sister, Anita Simke of Haifa, Israel; his first wife and mother of his children, Elane Geller of Sherman Oaks CA; his son, Dr. David Geller of West Los Angeles, CA: his daughter, Esther Geller of New York, NY, and; three grandchildren, Ben and Jack Geller and Vera Geller Freeman. Mo will be remembered as a brilliant physicist, a loveable curmudgeon and a very dear, albeit eccentric, father, brother, husband and friend, and we will all sorely miss him. R.I.P Big Mo. We hope you are somewhere out there in the galaxies you studied for so many years, finding the answers to all your unsolvable recreational math problems, and watching over us. We love you. ¿¿