Jim Herod Asks
A male in the species Homo Sapiens, I look around and ask that simple question:
What next?
Note that I am beyond four score and four years.
It is the history from all those years that creates a continuing expectation for change.
That expectation makes the question inevitable:
What next?
It all began when I was christened James Victor Herod.
Life changed me to just plain Jim.
I tell a few stories that evolved in those more than four score years. The events in those stories produced a reader, a writer, and a runner. The events in those stories happened to a boy and a teenager in Dallas County, Alabama. They happened to a student, a soldier, and a professor.
The owner of the SELMA SUN newspaper asked me, a native of Selma, to write stories of growing up in Dallas County, Alabama and of the adventures that followed. These stories will be loaded here. Included with those are a few stories that may have been inappropriate for a public newspaper! My editor put headlines on the stories which appeared in the newspaper.
Then, there are those other stories. Fiction! That's what they are. My wife will be quick to tell you that sometimes I jump up in the middle of the night and start on the way down the hall. "What's wrong?" she calls. "I have this story in my head and I have got to record it before it's forgotten." Oh! That again! I record some of those stories here.
In my writing, I prefer rich, dark coffee to sweet tea.
From 1964 until 2009, I told stories in science and mathematics.
Those stories are not here.
Those stories were in mathematical physics, in mathematical biology, and in the nature of evolving systems. They were created and told with others in the mathematics community. Research: that is what those stories are called. Mostly, the results of that research are on paper. Here are six of my research publications for illustration.
Longitude dependence of geo-magnetically trapped electrons, J Geophysical Res (1967, with Roderer and Welch)
Longitude dependence of geomagnetically trapped electrons. - NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
A pairing of a class of evolution systems with a class of generators, Trans American Mathematical Society (1971)
https://www.ams.org/journals/tran/1971-157-00/S0002-9947-1971-0281059-8
Coalescence of solutions for nonlinear Stieltjes equations, J fur die reine and angewandte Mathematik (1972)
Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik | GDZ (uni-goettingen.de)
A Hille-Yohida theory for evolutions, Israel J. Math (1980, with McKelvey)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02761228
Solutions for a Model Boltzmann Equation by Monotonicity Methods, Houston J of Math (1983, with Barnsley)
Solutions for a Model Boltzmann Equation by Monotonicity Methods (uh.edu)
The Mathematics of Biology and Mathematical Biology, Birkhauser and Springer (1996 and 2009, with Shonkwiler and Yeargers)
https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Biology-Introduction-Undergraduate-Mathematics/dp/0387709835