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2 Entries
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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