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Kurt Randall Myers ’86

Born in San Francisco, Kurt earned his bachelor’s degree at Reed with a double major in physics and chemistry, writing an interdisciplinary thesis on “A Relationship of a Trinity: a Linear Approach to Calculate the Ground State Energy of Helium Using the Wave Functions from an Exactly Soluble Free-body Model.” 

“I have found that I have quite an open mind and tend to be less judgmental than many of m colleagues,” Kurt once said of his Reed education. “The small conferences have given me the confidence to speak up in front of perfect strangers without feeling intimidated by them.”

At the University of Chicago he completed his PhD in theoretical chemistry with Dr. Karl Freed as his thesis advisor. Kurt’s publications were on theoretical predictions of polymer interactions with a surface, using renormalization group theory to calculate the polymer unit self-interaction terms.

After getting his doctoral degree in 1992, Kurt designed Angie’s wedding ring, and they were wed on September 5th. Their first home was in Brooklyn, where he clerked at the American Stock Exchange, became a licensed trader, and accepted his first job, at Citibank. Kurt used his software development skills to build a system to price and risk-manage the bank’s treasury portfolio.

He returned to Chicago to work for First Chicago as a liaison between its traders and programmers. After their two children were born, Kurt and Angie decided to move to England, where he worked for QAI and Thomson-Reuters. During their eight years in Greenwich, they explored England, Scotland, and Wales, with adventures in many other countries. When they returned to Chicago in 2012, Kurt became co-founder and CTO of socialmarketanalytics.com (SMA), where he worked tirelessly to ensure reliable data feeds to its growing customer base. His fine intellect and experience as a developer helped him develop new and better products, and left the company with an excellent software infrastructure and strategy for the future. At home, Kurt shared his passions for gaming, gardening, winemaking, reading, baking, astronomy, and the outdoors with his family. He also had a wicked sense of humor.

Kurt was the beloved husband of Maria De Los Angeles (Angie) Hernandez Myers; the loving father of Raquel and Pierce Myers; the cherished son of Carol Bruch of Pacific Palisades, California, and Jack Myers of Paradise, California; and the dear brother of Margarete Myers Feinstein ’83 (Morley) of Brentwood, California.

Appeared in Reed magazine: June 2016

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