and does not stop". Prior to this, there had been a long exchange of letters with his former student, in which he was seeking a fresh understanding of some concepts used in his earlier work, with Paul Dirac. Gamow relied on Alpher for deeper understanding of mathematics. On August 19, 1968, Gamow died at age 64 in Boulder, Colorado, and was buried there in Green Mountain Cemetery. The physics department tower at the University of Colorado at Boulder is named after him. Personal life Gamow had a son, Igor Gamow, with his first wife Rho in 1935. Their son later became a professor of microbiology at the University of Colorado, as well as an inventor. In 1956, Gamow divorced his wife Rho. In 1958 he married Barbara Perkins, an editor for one of his publishers. Gamow was a well-known prankster, who delighted in practical jokes and humorous twists embedded in serious scientific publications. His most famous prank was the pioneering Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper (1948), which was serious in its style and content. However, Gamow could not resist adding his colleague Hans Bethe to the list of authors, as a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. Gamow was an atheist. Writings Gamow was a highly successful science writer, with several of his books still in print more than a half-century after their initial publication. As an educator, Gamow recognized and emphasized fundamental principles that were unlikely to become obsolete, even as the pace of science and technology accelerated. He also conveyed a sense of excitement with the revolution in physics and other scientific topics of interest to the common reader. Gamow himself sketched the many illustrations for his books, which added a new dimension to and complemented what he intended to convey in the text. He was unafraid to introduce mathematics wherever it was essential, but he tried to avoid deterring potential readers by including large numbers of equations that did not illustrate essential points. In 1946 Gamow was a proponent of human spaceflight propelled by atomic energy. "We may prepare ourselves for a trip to the moon and to various planets of our solar system in a comfortable rocketship driven by atomic power." He also wrote "the ordinary chemical fuels which could be used in the motor of such a rocketship could not possibly give it the necessary velocity...". By 1965 he moderated his expectations though he