Michael Zeitlin was the finest and most focused student I was fortunate enough to encounter in 36 years of high school teaching in Garden City and Farmingdale, and 40+ years at Hofstra, NYU, and Columbia. He was the top research scholar among all my students, and his high school research findings on seasonal changes of microscopic phytoplankton (floating plants) in Hempstead Harbor was considered comparable to graduate college work by marine scientists at oceanography seminars we attended.

He did not win a major award at the Long Island High School Science Fair because the judges back in the early '70s didn't comprehend his work. What Michael found (with some help by Garden City student co-author Steven Du and myself) was that diurnal sunlight length (not temperature) was the most significant factor in the major mid-February phytoplankton bloom and in the mid-October phytoplankton collapse. The number of hours of daily skylight (including pre-sunrise and post-sunset light) in mid-February was the same as in mid-October. Skylight duration of approximately 15 hours was critical at Long Island's latitude, with skylight increasing to that amount to enable the annual February phytoplankton bloom and decreasing to roughly 15 hours to cause the microscopic marine plant population to collapse each October,

Zeitlin discovered three small data spikes of phytoplankton activity during the 4-mont dormancy period after the October die-off. He immediately declared them to be due to minor additional photosynthesis due to extra diurnal night-light derived from the Full Moon which reappears on a 30-day periodicity. The phytoplankton spikes matched three of the four Full-Moon occurrences during the dormancy period from October to February, but no spike had appeared during the January Full Moon.

Was extra night-light from the Full Moon the cause of the unexpected three photosynthesis activity? I at first thought 'No', but Michael was right. His brilliant incisive obduracy enabled him to stand up to my probling objections, He proved his point by checking back and finding that the January Full-Moon sky had been completely overcast with thick clouds, which explained satisfactorily why no increase in photosynthetic activity among the plankton had been noted during the January Full Moon.

Michael earned top grades in all my high school courses without attending any of them. He would work on research in my back room while listening to my teaching through an open door, and he used my class tapes to fill in his rough notes. He also did outstanding research on groundwater movements in Nassau County with Steve and me that prepared him for his MS work at SUNY-Stony Brook and for his research at Texaco where he discovered revolutionary new methods of locating underground oil and gas through three-dimensional subsurface imaging.

Zeitlin won the prestigious National Carnegie Award several years ago as the top technology-transfer research scientist in the nation, and his works were installed in the Smithsonian Archives in Washington. Texaco built a multi-million-dollar laboratory for him and his staff, where he developed still more effective methods to find oil and gas.

Today, Michael Zeitlin is CEO of his own company, Magic Earth, where he continually improves his discoveries to find underground fuels to help keep our civilization and economy running and to prevent energy shortages for decades or longer before safe, nonpolluting, inexpensive alternative energy sources can be developed. Magic Earth is being bought by Halliburton for $100 million, but he will remain as CEO. Zeitlin was interviewed on Jim Lehrer's PBS News Report, Brian Jennings' ABC News Report, and in The NY Times Science Section. His work can be best seen in Atlantic Monthly Magazine, January 2001.