As I wrote in the chapter introduction, during the summer of 1973 I was commuting down to Washington, DC, each day from Baltimore for my (summer) job at an architectural consulting firm. The firm, called "Maurice W. Perreault and Associates", specialized in hospital planning as conceived by an architect, "Bill" Perreault. He had attracted a receptionist/typist, a draftsman/expert in floor layout, other experts as needed, and a promising young problem-solver (me). Besides doing whatever analysis I did, I also accompanied Bill on a few of his visits with clients. Perhaps I was supposed to help foster the impression that he had more than a one-person operation.
Bill was a dynamic person: Proud to have been a "fly-boy" in the era of the Korean War, audacious in focusing on the area of the hospital planning architecture, and fired up to compete with the big firms. Years later I found this short article, on page 29 of the December 1952 issue of Aviation News, entitled "Pinwheel in Hoist Pickup --- Battleship `Chopper' Prefects System"."A helicopter unit aboard the Battleship Wisconsin tested for the first time a method of picking up stretcher patients from destroyers and other ships whose deck space does not permit the pinwheel to land."Previously it had been necessary to make the ship-to-ship transfer by means of a time-consuming and sometimes dangerous high line rig stretched over some 100 feet of water."In the new method the stretcher is suspended from the helicopter hydraulic hoist wire at a slight angle with a specially-built sling. This permitted the helicopter crewman, E. O. Luchtenberg, to pull the patient in head first through the small hatch."Lt. Maurice W. Perreault, pilot for the tests, and enlisted pilot Gregory J. Privitelli, crew chief for the HU-2 detachment, said the rig was the result of combined planning by the helicopter unit and the Wisconsin's deck and medical force. After the stretcher was tested with a dead weight, Cdr. Dante R. Marzetta, gunnery officer, volunteered as the first live patient."The tests took place in mid-Atlantic as the battleship was heading for Europe to participate in Main Brace.
I guess that I did all right, because Bill wanted me to join the firm permanently at the end of the summer. But when I had committed to the job, I was just completing my first year in graduate school at the University of Maryland. I had decided to go for a Ph.D. in my new field of Computer Science, in which I seemed to have great prospects. In any event, the summer wasn't a waste for me, because I ended up discovering those beautiful prism dissections!
Near the end of June 2014, I completed a project that I had planned for some time: the construction of a model of my prism dissection of two {5/2}-stars to a {10/4}-star. It provides a better picture of the pieces in the dissection than what is available in my book. You can find the pictures plus additional discussion on the webpage: Photos of a cherry wood model of my prism dissection of two 5-pointed stars to a {10/4} star, which is also linked from the photo gallery of my book.
Be sure to follow the link from that webpage to see an updated model in which I added mother-of-pearl "dots" to make the pieces even niftier!
I chanced upon my outdated biography recently, and thought that it is well past time for an update! I am still at Purdue University, but have been an Emeritus Professor since May 2017. You can view a photo of my last lecture in my last class plus photos of my retirement reception on my personal webpage. I am no longer actively engaged in algorithms research. My last doctoral student graduated a few years ago, and all of the undergrads and grad students who had taken courses with me have matured and most have already moved on to blossoming careers.
Since publishing my first book, I have published three more books, with the last one coming out in 2018. Each succeeding book has come to be full of unexpected revelations for me. (I highly recommend them all!) They are listed on my personal webpage (see the URL in the previous paragraph), so you have no excuse for missing out on them.
Before publishing my first book, I had actually had a hand in publishing an earlier book. At Harry Lindgren's invitation, I had revised his 1964 book Geometric Dissections, primarily by writing an appendix that described dissections that I had published in several articles in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics, plus a few additional dissections. This revision, called Recreational Problems in Geometric Dissections & How to Solve Them, was brought out in paperback by Dover Publications in 1972. Harry Lindgren was listed as the author, with the cover also stating "Revised & Enlarged By Greg Frederickson".
Years later I discovered by accident that this 1972 version had been translated into Russian and published in an inexpensive edition in 1977!
It's been a number of years now since I stopped furiously chasing a little round ball around the squash courts. Eventually the raspberry patch retreated, as raspberry patches usually do, the blueberry bushes at some point lost their vigor and disappeared, and the cherry trees failed to thrive as they were buffeted by midwestern winters. My once-young children are now fully adult children, exploring life at the next level.
Copyright 2019, Greg N. Frederickson.
Permission is granted to any purchaser of
Dissections: Plane & Fancy
to print out a copy
of this page for his or her own personal use.
Last updated June 25, 2019.