I was first introduced to computers in my senior year of high school, Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas. I graduated high school in 1966. As a young math whiz, I was part of an honors math class that learned so much Calculus that I placed into the third semester of Advanced Calculus as a freshman at Vanderbilt University, and during that semester I tutored the sophomore science and engineering students in the class with me. And we didn’t get to anything that was new to me until most of the way through the semester.
Our amazing math education was not just because we were young prodigies, although some said we were. More important than who we were had to be who our teacher was, Mrs. Lee Ellwood, a genius of a teacher who had taken every math course offered at S.M.U., undergrad and graduate, but wasn’t interested in writing a dissertation so they couldn’t give her a doctorate. But the math profs at S.M.U. were in awe of Mrs. Ellwood, so naturally, when they kept bombing out trying to teach Fortran, the new computer language that was so important in the early days of serious computer use, to their freshman Engineering students, they appealed to Mrs. Ellwood to figure out what they were doing wrong. The deal they offered her was that she would learn Fortran, which she was bound to do anyway, then she would bring us out to S.M.U. once a week for an evening class and teach us Fortran. Read the rest of this entry »