The NACA Research Culture The personnel at LRC were classified according to their functions. There were the professional research engineers and the non-professionals. The engineers were of two types: experimentalists and theoreticians. The support personnel consisted of technical support (wind tunnel mechanics, machinists, typists, etc.) and infrastructure support. There were also a couple of non-research professional positions: technical librarians and “mathematicians”. These mathematicians were not, in any sense, like the mathematicians that taught math at UVA, nor were they like the theoretical physicists (which was to become my classification). They performed some of the computational tasks that were subsequently performed by electronic computers. Although the librarians and mathematicians often developed a certain familiarity with some of the technical terminology, they didn't have the scientific background for research...
Dr. McShane But now I want to return to those first days of my introduction to graduate level mathematics, specifically to one course with the intimidating title, “Functions of a Real Variable”. The lecturer was Dr. E. J. McShane. He was the acting head of the department, in the absence of the permanent head who was on a sabbatical. I think that I may have made a slight impression on him by sitting on the front row in class, looking at him as he lectured, and attempting, with some success, to explain a theorem that he had assigned for study. But he definitely made an impression on me. He had enrolled all of the new graduate math students in this class. Apparently he wanted to give us a proper introduction to abstract mathematics, because he spent the first six weeks of the course teaching us logic in considerable depth – far beyond the basic logic of my high school course in Euclidean geometry. This logic utilized an extensive system of symbols that was appropria...
My Unlikely Hobby I often spend a warm summer afternoon sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of that tall pine tree in my front lawn while translating a novel or short story from Russian. I have no interest in visiting Russia or communicating with Russians in any way. This hobby developed in a circuitous way. When NASA had offered a free on-site course in Russian, I enrolled in it because I thought it would help me to translate some Russian publications on ionized gases. I had studied German in college, and had maintained and improved on my translating skills by reading German stories and watching a few German language movies. This ability proved to be of some benefit in ...
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