My Favorite Georgia Tech Mathematics Professor by James Pate Williams, Jr. BA, BS, MSwE, PhD

I distinctly recall Herr Doctor Professor Gunter Meyer, PhD, etc. of the Georgia Institute of Technology Department of Mathematics. I had him for the following courses:

  1. Math 4348 Partial Differential Equations Winter 1982 A
  2. Math 4640 Scientific Computing I Summer 1982 B
  3. Math 6341 Partial Differential Equations I Fall 1982 B
  4. Math 6342 Partial Differential Equations II Winter 1983 D

The 4000 level mathematics courses were primarily for junior and/or senior math majors and the 6000 tier courses for traditionally graduate school math majors. I made a D in Math 6342 due to the fact I did not solve a computer-based problem that Professor Meyer assigned. I would go and hang out with Dr. Meyer in his office quite a lot. He denigrated me for studying “ancient history in chemistry and physics” when I asked him about the expansion of the distance between interacting electrons used in the quantum mechanical perturbation theory calculation of the total energy of the Helium atom.  Dr. Meyer stated back in 1982 that he traveled to Washington, District of Columbia, our capital, frequently to report partial differential equation calculation results on nuclear reactors for the Department of Energy. I got in contact via telephone with Dr. Meyer in either 2011 or 2014 I forget which year to ask if he remembered me and he stated he could not recollect having me as a student. That sort of hurt my ego and feelings but in defense of Dr. Meyer, he had a long and illustrious career professing at Georgia Tech, and he met a whole lot of students.

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Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.

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