Gabriel L. Miller

Gabriel Lorimer Lory Miller of Eastham Massachusetts died peacefully at home on February 25th, 2017, surrounded by his family. He was 89, and had been suffering from Parkinsons Disease for many years. He was married to actor Natalie Ross Miller for fifty-four years. They had three children; Matthew, who passed away from lung cancer in 2010, Jonathan, and Kate. Lory was born in New York City of British parents and grew up in London. His father, actor Hugh Miller, taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was voice coach (and acted in) the films Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago. His mother, Olga Katzin, wrote satirical verses for the New Statesman and The Daily Herald under the pseudonym, Sagittarius. As a boy of twelve, he was in London with his family during the blitz in 1940, and in 1957 he earned his PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of London. Lory came to America with no job and fifty dollars in his pocket, and within three days landed a job at Brookhaven National Labs in Long Island. It was there that he gravitated to general issues of sensing, instrumentation and measurement, which allowed him to work on an extraordinary range of projects throughout his career. In 1963 he moved to Bell Labs in Murray Hill N.J., and for the next thirty-three years he made important contributions in spacecraft experimentsnotably on Telstar One, particle accelerators, charge-coupled devices, partial fraznoid oscillation, semiconductor instrumentation, electromagnetic actuators, and many many more. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Physics, Life Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the Bohmische Physical Society. He received the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984, and the IR-100 Award for applied design after he retired from Bell. He was a visiting professor at the Institute of Physics, Aarhus University, Denmark, and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He authored nearly one hundred peer reviewed papers, and holds over forty patents. He rose to become head of the Robotics Department (after initially refusing the promotion because he preferred to continue doing research in the lab.) and went on working after his retirement, consulting and designing. He was devoted to physics, which he always felt was a profound and special field. Lory was a loving husband and father, formidable at ping-pong and chess, and as his children will attest, cooked great meals and made up hilarious bed-time stories. His clear intellect and capability for analytical thinking, that he shared every night around the dinner table in warm and lively conversation, was deeply influential on his children. He stressed the value of logic, evidence, getting the numbers right, and order-of-magnitude estimation, skills which his children practice and cherish to this day. He was charming, gregarious, witty and brilliant, beloved by countless colleagues and friends, and well known for his infectious laugh and his jokes, a non-stop outpouring of puns that he felt should be bequeathed to the nation as a national treasure. We all feel he was a prince among men, and we deeply mourn his passing. Lory is survived by his wife Natalie; daughter-in-law Giedre Miller and her daughters Fia and Ada, of Princeton, N.J.; son Jonathan and his wife Carissa, of Washington, D.C.; daughter Kate Miller, her husband Lawrence Goodman and their sons Izzy and Caleb, of Providence, R.I.; a cousin, Peter Katzin of Arlington, MA.; and his brother Jonathan Miller, his wife Brigid, and their four children, of Cambridge, England. The family extends heartfelt thanks to Sheila Knight for years of loving care, to Hope Hospice, and to all the wonderful nurses, CNAs and EMTs who took such good care of Lory.