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 A math guy's random thoughts. |
| A math guy's random thoughts. |
| Six Things You Don't Know About Me Charles 🐾   challenged me to write a blog listing six things people don't know about me. This is, apparently, part of a group activity. Of course, there are lots of things people don't know about me. The challenge is to find things that (a) I'm willing to reveal; and (b) that are at leastly mildly interesting. This turned out to be harder than I'd expected. Here goes. 1. Some of you do know my real name, but most people on WDC do not. You see, "Max Griffin" is my pen name, not the name my mother gave me. In real life, people call me "Bill," unless I've done something to annoy them. Then they tend to use a less neutral sobriquet. An interesting story: Alex Morgan  and I have known each other online for years by our pen names. We've even written a couple of books together. Last year, we met in person for the first time with our respective spouses. I called him "Alex" and he called me "Max," even though our given names are "Greg" and "Bill." Our spouses found this amusing. 2. You almost certainly don't know why my mother chose "William" for my name. It was the name of my great-great-grandfather, William Henry Ray. He immigrated to the US from Ireland, arriving in Philadelphia in 1850 from County Fermanagh in Ireland. He met his bride, Ann Prentice, on the ship from Ireland, and they married shortly after arriving in Philadelphia. His descendents include William Henry Ray, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan project. And me. I never did weapons research, but I did prove lots of theorems. 3. While I never did weapons research, I did make a small, indirect contribution to the first Gulf War. Logistics--the task of organizing and staging the timely arrival of supplies--was initially a major problem in Desert Storm, but a task force figured it all out using some advanced statistical tools. One of the people on that task force was a former student of mine, and he told me what he'd learned in my stochastic processes course was fundamental to the success of the logistical part of the war. My old National Guard unit was deployed for that campaign, so my former student's comments meant a lot to me. 4. You also don't know why I chose "Max Griffin" for my pen name. The name "Griffin" has Irish--or at least Celtic--roots, and refers to the mythical half-lion/half-eagle creature of Greek and Persian legends. Since I planned to write speculative fiction and have Irish heritage, that seemed a reasonable choice for a pen surname. "Max" is to honor my uncle Max, who was killed in the Pacific in the Second World War before I was born. 5. You probably don't know that I once played a piccolo solo before an audience of over twenty-thousand people. That sounds impressive, but they weren't there to hear me play. My high school band ended every concert with John Phillip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever," which has an exquisitely difficult picollo solo at the end. We gave a concert at the county fair right before the drawing for a new 1968 Buick, so all those people were there to see if they won a car. 6. I see Charles 🐾 listed all the celebreties he's met. I don't have nearly as impressive a list, and telling you about the time I met Nicholas Meyer would be one of those embarrasing moments best left out. But I do have one kind of interesting story involving someone who eventually became a celebrity, long after I met him. I spent one year at the University of Dubuque in Iowa, and one of my regular study partners was a nice fellow from New Jersey who was on a wrestling scholarship. I didn't know I was gay back then, but I did notice he was cute in addition to being smart and dedicated to success. His name was Tony Danza. I'm sure he doesn't remember me, but when Taxi aired, I remembered him.That's six things you probably didn't know about me. Aren't you glad you read this? Now your life is complete. |
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