bob's academic career: overview

the bullet list:

• grows up in a small rural village of Florida, NY about an hour northwest of NYC,
  reads a lot [see photo history]
• Goshen Central high school in rural NY state (1966-1970)
  math from Don Lyons, physics from Andy Kujawski,
  Latin from first year teacher Charles Eisenhart 1967-1968,
  [distant relative of the famous Princeton differential geometer and Dean Luther P. Eisenhart],
  reads Lieber and Lieber book "The Einstein Theory of Relativity" in early high school and thinks he'll really be smart when he learns what tensors are (but first calculus!),
  learns Fortran with punch card programs,
  writes paper for Don Lyons generalizing the square root and cube root algorithms to the nth root based on the binomial expansion before realizing it was not very efficient,
  [looks like bob was not the only one to be interested in this: shifting nth root algorithm!]
  evaluates by hand the coefficients of the expansion of cos(theta)^(43) for amusement (sick or what?), reads lots of books, mostly novels,
  never gets drunk or does drugs (this was the late sixties) but does attend Woodstock in the summer of '69
• applies to only 2 colleges, Union College for computer science in Schenectady, NY and Princeton for math, encouraged by guidance counselor Mr Kennett, picks the obvious choice and is accompanied by the son of his 9th grade math teacher
  
  
• undergraduate years at Princeton University (1970-1974),
  hair worn in pony tail in the fashion of the times,
  diverted into physics from mathematics by fellow freshman David Derbes and their then young freshmen physics instructor Mark Strovink [his first year teaching].
  
• receives sophomore inspiration in modern physics class (1971) from relativist John A. Wheeler [remembrance by Ruffini et al],
  [bob fails to go see Pink Floyd the night before a modern physics test thinking he needed to study, what a mistake!],
  1972 bob meets bianchi and Remo Ruffini (thanks to then junior Jim Isenberg),
  falls into general relativity (finally learns what tensors are),
  learns some spanish to get through the language requirement, laying the foundation for fluency in Italian some years later in Rome
• bob meets Godel in the fall of 1973 and gets pointers to current research in rotating cosmological models
• AB in physics 1974,
  shares the Shuichi Kusaka Memorial Prize in Physics with four classmates of an exceptional year for physics, inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and invited to join Sigma Xi, summa cum laude...small town kid makes good?
  
  
• graduate years at UC Berkeley (1974-1978)
  bob gets better acquainted with bianchi cosmology and thesis advisor Abe Taub
  first visit to Italy 1975 (Erice Cosmology School),
  crosses paths with Michael Spivak, sitting in on his differential geometry class
  when he should have been attending statistical mechanics (survived with the notes),
  visits Waterloo 1978 (GR8) long before meeting the computer algebra system Maple,
  gets drunk for the first time to see what all the fuss is about,
  still doesn't do any drugs,
  but cuts ponytail in spring of 1978
  [see summer 1977 Road Trip in brother don's 1970 GTO Judge, ponytail shot]
• PhD in physics in 1978,
  receives Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Mathematics (for Applied Mathematics)
  
  
• UNC postdoc year at Chapel Hill (1978-1979)
  with James W. York, Jr.,
  bob meets MGX (MG2 at Trieste)
  
  
• NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellowship year  at U of Rome (1979-1980)
  bob does rome, with Remo Ruffini,
  and the group G9,
  learns Italian, wine, pasta, and the Italian way of life,
  first gets to Pompei to find it on strike
  
  
• Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics (1980-1981)
  postdoc with Juergen Ehlers,
  bob tries to learn German but fails,
  takes many trains between Rome and Munich,
  GR9 in Jena, East Germany 1980 (before Unification!),
  bob meets Castel Gandolfo and the Vatican Observatory;
  gets his first of many Casio calculator Geek watches as a gift from
  Michele and Uli when leaving Munich, allowing quick resetting
  of his alarm after each class so that he does not forget the
  next one during his future teaching career
  
  
• Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1981-1983)
  NSF postdoc with Bill Press and Doug Eardley,
  bob meets TeX and computer terminals,
  remembers Fortran from high school,
  first trip to China 1982 (MG3 in Shanghai)
  
  
• Villanova University Dept of Mathematical Sciences (later Dept of Mathematics and Statistics) (1983-)
  [Dept of Mathematics when Computing Sciences splits off in 1991,
    then name change to Dept of Mathematics and Statistics in the 2010s]
  thanks to a chance telephone call from Fritz Hartmann, then chairperson,
  bob is invited to speak and gets the job, then
  bob meets calculus and the swedes Kjell and later Claes and others
  (1984 and after: about 8 visits to Stockholm)
  and ani (1985) and Paolo and later Donato
  and Ponza (1985),
  and goes out in a pair of canoes in the Wakalla Spring swamps with Leopold Halpern and Paul Dirac
  two Easter breaks in a row in the mid 1980s,
  and starts doing gravitoelectromagnetism...? (1988)
  and VAX/VMS (retired in 2000), TeX, then LaTeX, then PC's and Windows,
  and MAPLE and the web in the mid 1990s ...
  while starting his cooking diary "What, Me Cook?" in the early 1980s,
  migrating to the web with the annual christmas card in the mid 1990s as
  http://www.drbobenterprises.com,
  producing the first dr bob cd in 2002,
  pushing to get the math department web site established in 1999
  discovering his mathematical and physics ancestry at Princeton through the
  Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s Oral History Project
  which he discovered in 1999 after bob's PhD advisor and former Princetonian Abe Taub died
  and upon a chance meeting with retired historian of science Charles Gillispie through the Princeton
  math-physics library, and transferred to the web to make it available to the world
  
  continues tri-annual visits to Rome at the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics of Remo Ruffini until 1991 (marriage to ani),
  after which annual visits were reduced in number and duration,
  including about 10 trips to Sweden,
  with world travel to attend conferences in Italy (1983, GR10, Padova; 1985, MG4, Rome; 1995, GR14, Florence; 2000, MG9, Rome),
  and elsewhere: Sweden (1986, GR11, Stockholm), Australia (1988, MG5, Perth), Japan (1991, MG6, Kyoto), Korea (1991, IK3, Seoul), Boulder (1989, GR12, Colorado), Argentina (1992, GR13, Buenos Aires to Cordoba),  Stanford (1994, MG7, California), Israel and Jordan (1997, MG8, Jerusalem),  Rio de Janiero (2003, MG10), Dublin (2005, GR17), Berlin (2006, MG11), Paris (2008, MG12) passing through Hong Kong (1988, 1991)
  and  family visits to Anjar, Lebanon via Damascus, Syria (1995, 1997) and direct to Beirut (1998, 2005, 2008), and to Buenos Aires (1992, 2003)
  
  taking thousands of photos along the way (digital from 2002)
  and forgetting even the square root algorithm ...
   
• but the story continues... in 2005 bob is reconnected by his third Latin teacher to his second Latin teacher Marion Williamson who retired after bob's single 9th grade year with her in 1967 (his first Latin teacher was in 8th grade in his home town Florida high school)---at the age of 101 she was living in her own apartment and doing email. Sadly she did not survive another year.
   
• bob buys a tux in 2008 to attend the Mendel Award Dinner for his friend George Coyne, and gets to return the following year for Ken Miller's dinner, and continues the habit every year.
   
• in 2009 thanks to the global financial crisis which hit the previous fall, ani and bob finally get to live together in Rome as (almost) Romans for 2.5 summer months! Fully documented on Facebook. Wow, what fun. repeated in the same apartment each summer through 2012 so far.
  
• 2009-2019 bob and ani become part time US expats in Rome each summer in the same rented apartment, integrating into the social fabric of the neighborhood near Villa Ada. Good food, wine, friends, scenery, art... no car, no airconditioning. A few heat waves over the years tested us with the last item. 2019 is bob's 40th anniversary of visiting Rome every year since 1979.
  
• 2011 bob gets the Villanova University Faculty Research Award and uses corkscrew pasta surface to illustrate how general relativity works in his popular talk the next spring
  
• 2020 was not a good year due to the global COVID pandemic. The first year NO ROME for bob (everyone was grounded that summer). Who retires from ICRANet; begins intensive multisemester sequence of online teaching and frenzied handwritten note creation for calculus II-III and diffeq for scanning to PDF and remote teaching
  (ICRA died a natural death, but lingers on anyway)
• Back to Rome for 5 weeks in summer 2021!
• 2022 bob wakes up 3am to do a short remote remembrance of his friends in GR Napoli.
• 2022 also sees his ellipse evolute graphic done with Fritz Hartmann chosen as a logo for a center for psychodelic drug therapy in the UK
• Back to Rome for 2 months and a week in summer 2022 but bummed out by COVID and the heat wave.
• Summer 2024 bob attends a late June Armenian wedding in Yerevan, returing home too late to avoid the excessive July Roman heat, so the first summer apart from the universal COVID grounding in 2020 that he does not make it to Rome
  
  
• bob retires from teaching December 2024 and is promoted out of Villanova as a professor emeritus August 2025.
• Finally freed of the travel constraints of the academic calendar, bob attends the final 5 days of Carnevale in Venice in March, and then hits London and Paris in late April, returning to Rome for June and some overlap with May-July.
• 2025 returns attention to his never to be published e-book on differential geometry for motivated self-study students, last offered as an overambitious class in 2012.
• 2026 serendipitous Princeton connection between Michael Spivak and Tullio Levi-Civita is made evident from ellipsoid geodesic email correspondence with another Princeton grad.