On the wall of room 437, above the blackboard covered with complex math formulas and grids marked with faint remnants of sine curves, lies an unsigned paper Haiku stone: “This class is going / To enlighten you for life. / Math is number one.” The last line, the catch phrase of math teacher Richard Geller, is printed on signs around the room, which is filled with math awards and news stories. Geller, who has taught at Stuyvesant since 1982, has spent the last several decades attempting to teach students not only the intricacies of algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus, and other forms of math, but also the beauty of the subject to which he has dedicated his life.

According to Geller, math held great importance for him from an early age. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, he was what he calls an “average” kid, one who spent his free time playing touch football, stickball, and handball with friends in the street. However, “I was expected to do well, in school, by my parents,” he said, and “math was my best subject.” He is quick to add that he was a well-rounded pupil—one who not only did his math work, but also read all the books for his humanities classes instead of reading the Cliff Notes summaries, like some of his peers did. Even so, he knew from the time he was in elementary school that math is what truly interested him and joined the Midwood High School Math Team as a teenager.

After high school, he attended Brooklyn College and continued to live at home until he went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where he studied Statistics. He excelled at the school and, after his first year, was promised a fellowship that would cover his entire tuition. However, the move away from his hometown was short lived, because in April of 1968, President Richard Nixon announced that graduate students would no longer be exempt from the military draft.

However Geller was skeptical about fighting in the Vietnam War. “I was opposed to the war, because I felt that we shouldn’t be in Vietnam and that the reason for being there was that we would stop communism, and I didn’t think that would be true,” Geller said. Acting on his anti-war convictions, he enrolled in a City College of New York program through which he could become a teacher in one summer. At the time, teachers at underprivileged schools were deferred from the army.

Following his hasty training, Geller taught algebra and trigonometry at Junior High School 143 for 13 years, and later at Intermediate School 44 for one year. “My first year of teaching, I was not very good. I could not control a class, which might be hard to believe,” he said. Gradually, he learned along with his students, developing his own style of teaching.

“He is, as most people know, very strict. As students, we were definitely scared of him, but everyone respected him a great deal because he always treated the students with a lot of respect and a lot of harsh love,” Stuyvesant alumnus Ming Jack Po (’01) said. “Part of his personality is to make sure that the students [are] always on the edge of their seats.”

After 14 years as a junior high school teacher, Geller was looking to teach higher-level mathematics. “I was at the right place at the right time, and got a job at Stuyvesant High School. They were happy to have me because I was an experienced teacher, I had a good background, I had done math team in junior high school, and I would be the bottom person in seniority,” he said.

According to Assistant Principal Mathematics Maryann Ferrara, Geller has been an integral part of the Mathematics Department, constantly pushing the envelope to improve the level of education at the school. For example, in the early 1990s, he was one of the first teachers to use the graphing calculator in the classroom.

“Mr. Geller is a creative and resourceful educator,” Ferrara said. “He’s always looking for new and better way to present the material and you combine this with his love of problem solving. [Teaching] is something that just comes natural to him.”

For his work as an educator, he has received a great deal of recognition. In 1987, the New York City Teacher Center Consortium selected Geller to participate in its summer institute for “the depth of his academic background, interest and experience in curricular development, and his leadership ability,” Ferrara said. In 1990, the Mathematics Association of America awarded him the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished High School Mathematics Teaching for being the educator of some of the highest-scoring students on the American Mathematics Competition exam. That same year, he was chosen to represent Manhattan high school teachers for the 13th annual Teacher Recognition Day. Furthermore, in 1999, the New York State Mathematics League presented him with the Kalfus Award, which is given to distinguished math coaches.

“He’s extremely dedicated and extremely concerned that his students learn math and how to think,” math teacher Gary Jaye said.

Perhaps Geller’s most important role during his time at Stuyvesant was head coach of Stuyvesant’s math team, a position he held for almost 20 years, until math teacher Jim Cocoros took over in 2006. When Geller first started, he taught the team along with the captains, but over the years, as the team grew to up to 340 students, he acquired the help of other teachers. According to Ferrara, he has aided in the development curricula for the math team classes, has trained other educators to teach the math team students, and runs an annual workshop for current and prospective math team coaches.

Alumnus Mike Develin (‘96), who was captain of the math team from 1995 to 1996, said, in an e-mail interview, “I remember at the time thinking that he was a disciplinarian. As time went on, though, I realized that he cared very deeply for his students and that without the structure he provided, there is no way that the math team would have been as successful. I later came to appreciate how important a figure he was in terms of me growing up and in transitioning my interest in math from merely a game to something that really mattered to me.”

According to Geller, teaching the close-knit group of students on the math team is highly enjoyable because “the students are more enthusiastic for math. They’re interested in learning things in math outside the curriculum, and they’re not doing it for a grade. They’re doing it because they love math,” he said.

He fondly recalled his experience with the New York City Math Team, which includes numerous Stuyvesant students. When the team wins state or national competitions, Geller said, “I get all excited and jump up and down and scream, especially with the national competition, because we don’t win that very often.”

“Competition puts a fire in his eyes and that fire is contagious,” President of the New York State Mathematics League George Reuter said in an e-mail interview. However, he added, “I have watched him help administer the tiebreaker round for the last several years. He derives joy when the kids ‘get it.’ It doesn’t have to be a NYC kid […] Any kid who succeeds in solving a difficult problem gets an ‘attaboy’ from Richard. He pushes and encourages and inspires and prods and believes the best for those under his care.”

In addition to working as assistant coach of the New York City Math Team, Geller worked as a secretary, and later as a member of the Board of Directors, for the New York City Interscholastics Mathematics League. “For the IML, he was basically running all the logistics for many, many years. That includes stuffing all the envelopes himself, writing all the score reports, collecting all the information. Basically, he was indispensable to the IML,” said Po, who recalled how Geller used to proofread math questions for the league even while on vacation. “He was taking a lot of time out of his own weekends and weeknights, doing all this stuff just so the students would get more math enrichment experiences.”      

However, Geller’s classroom is not only decorated with plaques from mathematics competitions. In between the awards, articles about current event in the field of mathematics, and graphs of conic sections, lie pictures of Geller on his numerous bike trips and blurbs written by him about his travels.

In fact, Geller is what some might call a food connoisseur who loves eating at fancy restaurants, and a chef in his own right. He cited his chocolate cake, lemon tart, and cold raspberry soufflé as his specialties. In the short story “Bouley’N Algebra,” part of a compilation called “This is Your Life Richard B. Geller,” Barbara Bringardner Geller wrote, “17 years ago when the Stuyvesant Math Team was growing fast and becoming more popular with students, Richard needed to come up with additional names for the many teams. He could have named them Team A, Team B, Team C, etc. But no, he wanted something more interesting. He decided to name them Team B, Team O, Team U, Team L, Team E, and Team Y,” in honor of one his beloved eateries, Bouley Restaurant.

His other hobby is biking. Every summer, he and his wife go on a bike trip to a different country. In the past the two have gone to France, England, Denmark, and Italy, amongst other countries. Yet, Geller stated that his favorite trip was in the U.S., two years ago, when they biked from Buffalo to Albany along the Eerie Canal. “It turned out to be close to 400 miles. We did it in about 10 days, and we carried our own things. On the other trips, it was organized trips, so the company carried our suitcases from one place to another,” he said. “I learned a lot of history about the Eerie Canal and about New York State.”

However, according to Geller, he does not bike as much anymore, because, in late March, he was diagnosed with cancer. “In December, I had a melanoma taken off of my chest and the doctors thought that everything was clear and I was okay. However, I guess some of the cancer cells found their way into the blood stream and went to my lungs,” he said. “I am very tired all the time. I ache. I can’t go as fast as I used to—that’s the most frustrating thing. Mr. Geller had all this energy all the time.”

“Melanoma is a bad cancer to have. I’ve learned a lot since I got it,” Geller said. He takes pills every day to combat the cancer and travels to Richmond, Virginia every 28 days as part of an expanded access trial of a new drug. At present, no hospitals in New York offer the drug, which has been successful in the treatment of other patients.

He was very forward about his condition from the start, announcing it at a math department meeting, posting signs in the mail room, and informing his students about it. “I don’t want to hide anything. Rumors get around which are false a lot of times […] So I just put everything in the open,” he said. “People feel that they can come up to me and wish me well, where as if I didn’t tell them, they might think I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Despite his condition, Geller hopes to continue teaching because of the pleasure it gives him. “[One] morning, I wasn’t feeling too good, and I walked into my class and started teaching them, and I realized, towards the end of the period, I feel pretty good. That’s because I love teaching math,” he said. “The staff and the students have perked me up.”