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Marty described himself as a child who was relentlessly curious about how to build things; he constant took things apart and put them back together. After a family friend taught him how to build radios, he began going to Canal Street to buy radio parts. On his way, he encountered the intermingled fish district and radio district. His loves of tropical fish, aquariums and radios endured throughout his life.

One of his favorite memories was creating a life size illustration of the human skeleton with his brother, Herman. He said that painting the brown butcher block paper with black India ink was absolutely magical.

Marty sometimes called himself a "wizard."

His loved challenges that were declared impossible. He said, "I can do anything with a piece of gum and a rubber band."

He loved the characters of Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia and Shiv from Indian mythology. He talked about the world being created through a dance. He often used the phrase "deep magic." Through his work, Marty "danced" many scientific concepts into being and explored the "deep magic" that he found within science and nature.

He was also an impossibly stubborn atheist. He discouraged his children from believing in Santa Claus, the toothfairy or any other magical beings. This was often the source of spirited arguments around the kitchen table.

However, on afternoons when he felt he'd done particularly stunning work, he'd look up from his computer and say, "I've been talking to God.

I've been talking to God today."

Marty was born in the mixing pot of 1940's Brooklyn.

One of Marty's many peculiarities was that he swore he had vivid memories from being a baby: lying in his crib, getting his bottle, etc. He learned not to talk of these things because people thought he was crazy!

He dreamily remembered being a toddler and using a magnet to pick pins up off the floor of the dress shop where his mother, Fanny, worked. He would do this for hours in a trance, wondering how the magnet picked up the pins. Even though he was ruthlessly scientific in his work, he maintained this sense of childlike wonder that pins could be lifted off the floor by a magnet. I feel that this co-existing experience of the world as both scientific and magical was the core of what made his work so unique.

His father, Leo, worked in the post office. The family had a large map of Europe on the kitchen wall and his father would move red pushpins around the map to trace the progress of the war. Later in his life, Marty introduced the concept of using color coded maps in medical diagnosis. His work in "mapping" continues to provide doctors with a wealth of previously hidden diagnostic information.

When Marty was seven, he built a slide projector with a shoe box and random things he found around the apartment. He projected images of the Kings and Queens of England from a picture book on to the tenement hallway walls, much to the amazement of his family. Marty loved to put on a show. He took great joy in creating engaging presentations of his discoveries and sharing them with audiences at scientific conferences.

Both Marty and his older brother, Herman, were musical prodigies. After his Bar Mitzvah, Marty announced, "I am now a man and I am never going to play the violin again." From that point forward, science was Marty's artistic focus.