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Gerald Ratzer (Bio provided for 60th Anniversary Reunion 2023)
As most of you know, I was born in England, but came to Glasgow in 1947, where I was brought up in a multi-generational family with two grandmothers, who were retrieved from behind the Iron Curtain! I went to Kelvinside Academy before starting in Nat. Phil. at Glasgow University. While I was studying, my mother graduated (twice) in Medicine and my brother graduated in Economics from GU!
At the end of our degree programme, I remember playing golf with Robin Erskine against Professors Dee and Gunn. They asked me about my career plans and told them I did not want to do Physics for the rest of my life, to which they said I should go to Cambridge and do computers (an up-and-coming field!). They both wrote a letter of recommendation, and the rest is history.
After a most enjoyable year at St. John's College, Cambridge – my conversion from being a physicist to a computer scientist started and continued with an IBM Fellowship to McGill University in Montreal.
In 1966, I was appointed to a tenure track Assistant Professor position, one of the youngest in the University's history. I taught some large classes at both the undergraduate and graduate level and most likely supervised more graduate students than any of my colleagues. Over the last 40 years, I have been promoted through the ranks and am now Professor Emeritus. I took early retirement in 2005. I was a trustee of the University billion-dollar pension plan for nine years. Over this period, I also consulted to industry in several different scientific fields, but perhaps my greatest contribution was to Air Traffic Control simulation, where derivatives of the systems I developed have trained ATC specialists around the world.
I am married to Lorraine, and we have one son, Ian. He did three degrees, two at McGill and one at Cambridge. He is now in Silicon Valley working as an audio engineer for Apple. His wife, Sara, also works at Apple. They have one son, Calvin, born in 2022.
I travel extensively between our two properties in Quebec and the condo in Florida, where I was on the Board. For some 20 years I have been Branch Secretary of the Oxford & Cambridge Society of Montreal. One of my retirement projects is to take up bridge again – not having played it for some 50 years, since my misspent youth in the GU Union! I continue to use my Physics background to better understand Climate Change. I have been a co-author of a trilogy of papers, with an engineer who is some 13 years older than me. Links available on request.
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