Ralph was another full professor (and Chair of the Dept for a while). He seemed reasonable and intelligent in any dealing I had with him. But here is what I was told (by a reliable source) about his background.
(All of this was related to me by a colleague who had worked with Ralph for years.)
He was a statistician and had been a high shool teacher and basketball coach. This was when regional state schools were becoming “universities”. As a country, we were going to make sure that everyone had a university accessible to them. (It was a wonderful idea that doesn’t work in practice without a lot of thought and work.)
In trying to beef up the teaching staff at many of these colleges, we poured money into such programs as doctorates in math education. That is what Ralph became. But did Ralph understand math well enough to teach college math?
Ralph thought this. (Here comes the math, which I will always put in blue in these stories.) He thought that the funciton sin(1/x) could be made continous at the origin by making it zero there. My colleague tried to explain the problem, but Ralph could never get it.
I believe that this must have come from Ralph being taught only the “idea” of continuity, something that still takes place in calculus classes. (For anyone who thinks it isn’t important for engineers to know about epsilons, ask yourself if you want to fly in a plane designed by someone who uses Taylor Series approximations in the design, but doesn’t get the idea of “epsilon”. I was an engineer in the aerospace industry, and I think I know what your answer should be.)
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