Dr. Geoffrey Hunter
April 23, 1934 – December 4, 2008
A Celebration of the Life
of
Geoffrey
HunterTuesday, December 8th 2008
Bolton, Ontario Canada
Opening Remarks
Mark Williams, Brother-in-Law
Psalm 98:5-9
| Sing your praise to the LORD with the harp, with the harp and melodious song, with trumpets and the sound of the ram's horn. Make a joyful symphony before the LORD, the King! Let the sea and everything in it shout his praise! Let the earth and all living things join in. Let the rivers clap their hands in glee! Let the hills sing out their songs of joy before the LORD. |
Memories of Geoff
Thomas Alt, Brother-in-Law
Notes from the Past
Joyce Garnett, Sister-in-Law
Tributes
Tony Wallis
Tony Smith
Patrick Downey
Closing Remarks
Mark Williams, Brother-in-Law
Music by Chopin, Joplin and Beethoven
Family and friends are invited to a reception following the Service
….from Geoff’s web page….
Geoffrey Hunter, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry,
York University, Toronto, Canada
Dr. Hunter's outlook on life and science is ‘fiat lux.
:Quantum Chemistry: his own text "Introductory Quantum Chemistry", several papers on the theory and application of the factorization of a wavefunction into conditional and marginal factors - the Born-Oppenheimer Separation of Nuclear from Electronic motion but without the Approximation, and the Exact One-Electron Model of Molecular Structure.
Quantum Physics: the Nature of the Photon and the Electron. Research initiated in 1985 produced a mathematical model of the photon as a solitary (soliton) wave, whose size, shape and internal intensity are confirmed by several different experimental measurements and phenomena. The photon-soliton (for circularly polarized light) is an egg-shaped circular ellipsoid of length (the wavelength) and cross-sectional diameter. This finite-size explains the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle physically: the photon's momentum is distributed over its length, and hence the product of momentum and the position of that momentum is always equal to Planck's constant. This soliton model is the Bohr Model of Einstein's photon.
Computing: the experience of working with the well-designed Ferranti Atlas computer as a graduate student at Manchester University (1961-64), followed by years of frustrating experience working in the Fortran language on IBM mainframe computers (1964-), motivated Dr. Hunter to study the theory of computation (1975-), the result being the insight that Turing Machine processes demand dynamic memory allocation, whereas Finite Automaton processes can have their memory allocated before execution of the process commences (static memory allocation). This insight has implications for the design of computers and programming languages which are unrealized in widely used systems; the Unisys Clearpath MCP systems are exceptional, based upon the nested block structure that originated in the Algol-60 language.
Music: Geoffrey likes classical music, especially the music of Chopin, which he plays with some considerable technical skill and emotive expression on his Yamaha C7 grand piano. As an analytical thinker, he has studied the theory of music and produced original insights: there are just 10 triads and 10 tetrads (chords) after discarding the minor second as a dissonant interval; he plans to present this systematic theory of harmony in a book "Harmonic Notes".