Monthly Archives: February 2022

I’m stepping away from the Math Department for a moment (but only for a moment–I’ll be back there next week) because I came across something unusual in the Business Manager’s Papers, not typically the most entertaining collection. You just generally … Continue reading →

This is the kind of thing that happens when you spend thirty years in the same archive. One day last week I was rummaging around in a box of images used by the Rice News back in 1999. I smiled … Continue reading →

It  might seem improbable but the first man to receive a Rice doctorate appears in the very same 1926 photograph as the first woman to earn one. Hubert Bray ’18 is right over Miss Hickey’s shoulder towards our left: It’s … Continue reading →

Update: I got several emails and comments about yesterday’s post about Shmuel Agmon, specifically about the presence of two women in the department in 1926. This is a post from several years ago about the younger of the two, May … Continue reading →

I got an email yesterday afternoon from Rice Computer Science professor Moshe Vardi letting me know that his Great Grand Advisor Shmuel Agmon was celebrating his hundredth birthday. (Mathematicians carefully trace their academic genealogies. Here’s Agmon’s.) Agmon was hired by … Continue reading →