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Roger Hale Obituary

HALE, Roger Of Brookline, MA, died on August 2, 2011, after a yearlong struggle with cancer. He was born on November 3, 1951 in Berkeley, CA. In 1956 his family moved to New Jersey. He graduated in 1969 from Gov. Livingston High School, where he won third place in a national math contest. In 1976 he graduated from MIT where he majored in math. There he met Deborah Kraus, and in 1978 they were married in the MIT chapel. In 1988 he, his wife and two children moved to Brookline. From an early age he showed a great love of learning, with a special interest, for quite some time, in Buddhism. He was an active member of the Arlington Street Unitarian Church in Boston and where he sang in the choir. Roger was predeceased by his brother Peter Hale. In addition to his wife Deborah and his children, survivors include his sisters Eileen Hale of Grass Valley, CA, and Susanne Hale of Pelham, MA; his parents Albert and Virginia Hale of Davis, CA; his brother-in-law Nigel Kraus of Arlington, MA and sister-in-law Sibella Kraus of Berkeley, CA. There will be a Memorial Service on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 at 2 PM at the Arlington Street Unitarian Church in Boston. All are welcome!

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Published by Boston Globe from Oct. 1 to Oct. 2, 2011.

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Jeff White

August 18, 2024

I knew Roger only briefly, when he came for a day or evening, probably in 1972 or '73, probably home on a holiday from M.I.T., to Symbolic Systems, a software company started and owned by Frank Ponzio, Jr., then located in Berkeley Heights. I think he came to try out a program, or maintain a program he had written for the DEC PDP11. He was tall and thin with long black hair. I had heard so much about him from our Algebra teacher in Gov. Livingston H.S., Mrs. Ohl, and from others, that it was a thrill and an inspiration to meet the young man behind the legend. In Algebra II, Mrs. Ohl would practically swoon when she mentioned Roger. One story was when she was teaching Roger's class a theorem from trigonometry. Roger raised his hand and said "That theorem doesn't hold in spherical trigonometry."
That was probably in 1967 or '68. She never forgot it and neither did the class. Anyway, in my short experience, Roger was a quiet, modest fellow, who was liked and respected by Frank, my mother Elizabeth J. White, and everyone else at Symbolic Systems who met him.

Eileen Hale

May 16, 2012

When we were in high school, Roger had his math teachers totally intimidated. Many years later, I went to my 20th high school reunion, and a guy I'd known in high school said to me, "you were a math genius." I said oh, no, that was Roger...

I had done a patchwork quilt in variations of the Drunkard's path pattern, which lurches back and forth in offset quarter-circle patches, and I was wanting to find some more neat patchwork designs with curved pieces in them. Roger drew me a mathematical design called a dragon curve, from a kind of fractal equation, I think.

Besides his adeptness in math, he had a creative interest in both color and design, and singing. Truthfully, as older sister, I wasn't always really happy about this, as I wanted to keep art and music, especially art, as my own territory. But I sometimes now wish, especially, that I had been more open to singing together...

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