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Jule Gregory Charney

JULE CHARNEY WAS ONE of the dominant figures in atmo-spheric science in the three decades following World War II. Much of the change in meteorology from an art to a science is due to his scientific vision and his thorough commitment to people and programs in this field.

In 1946 he married Elinor Kesting Frye, a student of logic and semantics with H. Reichenbach at the University of California at Los Angeles. They had two children, Nora and Peter. Nicolas, Elinor's son from her previous marriage, assumed the last name of Charney. Their marriage lasted almost twenty-one years. In 1967 Jule married Lois Swirnoff. Lois is a painter and color theorist and was a professor at UCLA and Harvard. Their marriage lasted almost ten years. Jule shared the last years of his life with Patricia Peck, a photographic artist with roots in New York City and Venice. His last illness was lung cancer, from which he died in Boston on June 16, 1981.

THE BUDDING MATHEMATICIAN

Jule was born on New Year's Day 1917 in San Francisco. His parents, Stella and Ely Charney, had immigrated early in the century from White Russia, where the lot of Jewish citizens was difficult. Each of them had taken up work in the New York garment industry, but later met and married in St. Louis. After a brief stop in Denver, they moved to Los Angeles in 1914. Employment difficulties forced a temporary move for several years to San Francisco, where Jule was born. He spent most of his youth in Los Angeles with one important exception. This happened at the age of fourteen, when his mother, temporarily estranged from his father, moved back to New York. Jule later recalled that he did not like New York, but he also remembered that it was here at a relative's home that he came upon Osgood's book on calculus. Calculus was not taught in any of the usual high schools in the country, but exposure to this book and the realization that he could solve the problems excited his interest in science.

Mother and father...