Personal

My Family

Eric is a mechanical engineer who lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife Margie and their sons Bruce and Silas, our youngest grandchildren. Bruce was born on August 29, 2010, and Silas on January 12, 2012.

Eric is the coach of the North Seattle Little League Championship Team that includes Bruce and Silas (on the right)

Laura, our youngest, was trained as a civil engineer and lawyer, but now works part-time as an elementary school math specialist where she lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband Bob and their sons Blake and Derek. Blake’s birth on October 13, 1998 provided the impetus for us to think about leaving Maryland for Massachusetts, where we arrived just in time for Derek's birth on October 27, 2000. Time flies: Blake is living in Chicago after graduating from Northwestern University with honors in Economics and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, and Derek is a mechanical engineering major at Northwestern, scheduled to graduate in the spring of 2023. Here they are at Blake's graduation in June, 2021 (Blake is on the right).

Here are all my children and grandchildren together for Thanksgiving, November 2018.

What I Do for Fun

Now that I'm no longer teaching, I've got more time for family, travel and non-professional activities. I take MOOCs, I have volunteered taping physics and math textbooks for blind and dyslexic students and am currently a volunteer at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, I deliver mini-courses for Beacon Hill Seminars, and I've been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Brook House Condominium Association.

I love music, but my tastes are not eclectic. My preferences in classical music are symphonic rather than chamber, and traditional rather than atonal. My preferences in jazz are traditional, too: the Chicago-style of the 1930s, pre-1940 swing, and West Coast revival. I used to play a passable trombone in these styles, but these days I prefer to just listen to my collection on ITunes. I love some of the folk-rock and popular music of the 1960s, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, John Fogerty and Bob Seger, but current popular music venues like hip-hop leave me cold; I generally turn off the sound for the guest musical performers on Saturday Night Live.

I’m a political junkie who prefers the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker to the Economist. I read voraciously from books that range from physics texts to popular fiction, and I tend to exhaust one “favorite” author before moving on to another.

I used to try to combine business travel with vacation travel, with mixed results. Now that I'm no longer involved in research my travel is almost exclusively for vacation, and Carol and I try to take two or three trips per year. One of these annual trips is usually somewhat adventurous (in the past few years we've visited India, Guatemala, the Peruvian Amazon and Myanmar), and we've taken our older grandchildren on trips to London, Paris, Bermuda, Italy and Spain. We've also discovered that river cruises provide a wonderful venue for revisiting European cities. Our last trip to Patagonia in January of 2020 coincided with initial outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic, so our travel has been on hiatus for a while. We've scheduled our next trip for back-to-back Viking River cruises in France (Normandy and Provence) for the spring of 2022.

When we're not traveling we try to take advantage of the Boston cultural scene with a membership to the MFA and subscriptions to some local repertory theater groups. We'vesampled lots of Boston area restaurants during our first few years in the area, but we've gradually learned to appreciate that we don't have to travel very far from the center of Brookline Village in order to find an astonishing variety of wonderful food.

I’m still into sports, as both a participant and a fan. I played lots of team sports when I was younger, but all my competitive juices are now channeled into tennis. Now that I've had both knees replaced, I'm playing some singles again in addition to doubles. I was a fanatic Brooklyn Dodgers follower as child, and I still root for the L A Dodgers and my other childhood favorites: the Boston Celtics and the Baltimore Ravens (originally the Cleveland Browns). I have no idea how anyone over the age of 12 could possibly be interested in fantasy sports.

I multi-task all the time. I can rarely watch a game on TV without simultaneously doing some sort of word or number puzzle (I particularly like acrostics). I also like to sketch, and I get lots of satisfaction from being able to make recognizable caricatures with a minimum of penstrokes.