1940

While talking with my junior-year roommate John Moore recently I chided him for keeping me awake with a noisy calculator late at night. This reminded him of a tale that unfolded as follows:

"In my junior year professor Bancroft Brown (the head of the math department) persuaded a number of us math majors to sign up for an astronomy course called 'Celestial Mechanics.' Unfortunately, most of our group came to feel that we never learned much of anything really worthwhile other than possibly how to utilize a calculator efficiently and how to 'massage' the resulting statistical data via prescribed work forms.

"Later, in 1942, the U.S. Army sent me to OCS and I wound up as a platoon leader in a mapping unit. There, based on my seemingly 'useless' Dartmouth astronomy class, I learned how to determine latitude and longitude via astronomic observations and trained Army troops to do the same.

"The moral of this story is that you never know when something you've learned at Dartmouth, no matter how esoteric it may have seemed when you learned it, may turn out to be mighty valuable later in life."

Since the last column we have lost an additional classmate: Roger B. Conant Jr. on December 18,2005. We extend our sympathy to his family and friends.

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