Charles Moment

Charles Gairdner Moment passed away June 5, 2020 in Madison, WI, where he had lived since 2017 to be near his sisters when his health began to fail due to prostate cancer. He was born March 26, 1938, in Baltimore, MD, and he spent the bulk of his life in Maryland.

Charles was the son of Gairdner Bostwick Moment and Ann Faben Moment. His father was a well-regarded biologist at Goucher College and his mother was a socially-conscious and involved housewife.

Charles grew up in Govans in North Baltimore and he graduated from City College in 1955. He received his B.A. from Princeton University, in mathematics, in 1959, and proceeded to get a Master’s degree in math from Purdue and a PhD in math from Texas Tech.

He spent most of his career as a senior statistical analyst at the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn, MD from 1973 until his retirement in 2007. He was once asked what he liked about working at Social Security and he answered, “I’m a statistician and I like numbers. Where are there more numbers to play with than at the Social Security Administration?”

At work he was a valued colleague of all who worked with him, across disciplines. The Social Security Administration IT Department once had a complex problem on which they asked his help. He solved it on his own time, not expecting any praise. Charles just did it because it was interesting. However, he was awarded a substantial monetary prize, which he used to rent a beach-front condo in Ocean City for his entire extended family that summer.

As a teenager, Charles was a Sea Scout, where he learned to navigate on the Chesapeake Bay using a compass and charts, a skill which proved very useful when the family spent a summer at the Bermuda Biological Station. Charles was out on a 61-foot research vessel at night, when something went wrong with a winch. The crew was exhausted by the time the problem was fixed. Sixteen year-old Charles was asked to navigate the boat alone at night through open ocean back to Bermuda, only waking the crew when the harbor was in sight. No radar, just a compass and charts.

Charles traveled the world, including to Tahiti, Australia, Mexico and Turkey. He also loved visiting family across the U.S. for vacations and holidays.

Charles was a Life Master with the American Contract Bridge Association. But he was not a snob about games. Charles would play checkers with a six year-old or Uno with the family. He always had faith in the innate intelligence and capability of children.

Starting in the 1990’s, consistent with his love of numbers and complex patterns, Charles became an avid member of the currency tracking group, Where’s George? His “Georger” handle was CM Georger, and he was a frequent poster on their chat rooms and also attended regional “IRL” get-togethers, where everyone paid the restaurant in small bills marked with the website’s url. In 2004 a scientific paper was published by scientists from the German Max Planck Institute and the University of California at Santa Barbara, which studied the circulation of bills tracked by Where’s George and used the data for projecting how epidemics could spread in the future. Charles was an invited guest at the conference where this paper was presented.

Charles was an avid musician. He played bass viol in the City College orchestra and in the Princeton Triangle Club pit orchestra, and as a way to procrastinate in graduate school, he taught himself the piano by playing Beethoven and Domenico Scarlatti sonatas. Charles read musical scores the way you or I would read novels.

Charles was a kind, generous and humble gentleman and he was beloved by his sisters, Sarah Moment Atis, Ann Moment Combs and Jane Moment Jordan, their husbands, and by his many nieces and nephews and his great nieces and his great nephew. Charles was pre-deceased by his parents Gairdner B. Moment and Ann F. Moment, and by his brother James Faben Moment.

Interment of ashes will be private. In lieu of flowers: Donations can be made in his memory to the Gairdner B. Moment Prize in Biology c/o Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road, Towson, MD, 21204 or online at www.goucher.edu/gift specify Gairdner B. Moment Prize in Biology