Working in Ken Pitzer’s papers this afternoon I chanced upon something that made me laugh out loud. Here’s a letter he wrote in 1964 to Eugenia Rayzor, wife of Rice trustee Newton Rayzor ’17 (and a great woman in her own right, I might add):
This refers of course to the correspondence that arrived at the Woodson through Malcolm Lovett, Jr. only this year, the saga of which arrival I wrote about at this link. It took 53 years but it did wind up, as intended, in the Rice archives.
What I hadn’t realized was that Mrs. Rayzor was the daughter of Professor Milton B. Porter, who left Yale in 1903 along with his wife and his baby daughter in order to take up the chairmanship of the Math Department at the University of Texas. He taught there until his retirement in 1945.
I felt compelled at this point to go back and look at the letters again, just to make sure they really were the same ones Pitzer was talking about and, sure enough, here’s “Porter who goes to Texas”:
Fun Fact: There is a Milton B. Porter Chair of Mathematics at Rice. I know two of the holders have been John Hempel and Bill Veech, but I don’t know who has it now.
Bonus: Let’s do a little welding, shall we?
This Fall 2013 news item from the Rice math department (http://math.rice.edu/NewsEvents/NewsArchive/2013News.html) says: “Brendan Hassett was appointed Milton Brockett Porter Chair of Mathematics, succeeding John Hempel who retired at the end of the 2012-13 academic year.”
Dr. Veech held the Porter chair from 1988-2003 and then the Edgar Odell Lovett chair until his death on Aug. 30, 2016, according to the Sept. 20, 2016, Thresher.
On July 1, 2015, however, Dr. Hassett moved to Brown University. (http://math.rice.edu/~hassett/)
Rice’s General Announcements for 2015-16 and 2016-17 (http://www.rice.edu/catalog/2016_2017/GA-FY17-FINAL.pdf) make no mention of a current holder of the Porter chair in math.
I would not recommend welding with the face shields shown in picture. They offer no protection from high intensity UV light only flying projectiles.
Yikes! I will definitely steer clear.
Grinding, yes.
Welding, no.
With regard to Cornell Instructors, I find the writer to be biased. I myself am not…very.