My father, James Pate Williams, Sr. (Born November 8, 1912, and Died February 10, 1993) was forced to quit school at the age of thirteen in 1925 or 1926 and was initially a sweeper at the West-Point Textiles Company’s Dixie cotton mill on Greenville Street in LaGrange, Georgia. The reason he quit school was to support his birth family after they were abandoned by my Williams side grandfather. Sometime in the 1930s my father received a cost accountant degree from LaSalle Extension University based in Chicago, Illinois. He corresponded via mail with his professors to earn his degree. LaSalle Extension University was one of the first examples of a distance learning center. While on the job he used a Friden tabulating machine, a K&E drafting kit, and K&E slide rule. I probably got my love of mathematics and numbers from my birth parents. My father taught me how to use a compass, protractor, slide rule, and tabulating machine. He used paper spreadsheets and his Friden calculator to maintain household expenses and to document his and my mother’s income tax. My father was also in charge of the Civil Defense equipment stored at Dixie Mill. That Cold War era equipment included a Roentgen measuring device and Geiger counter. I learned how to use both Civil Defense devices while I was in high school.
Friden, Inc. – Wikipedia
Keuffel and Esser – Wikipedia
La Salle Extension University – Wikipedia
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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Numerical Explorations 