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Today's Featured Biography
Jean Schlunt Rhoads
GREETINGS
My husband, Don, and I who have been married for 59 1/2 years have
lived in Bloomington, Indiana, in Southern Indiana since 1972. Since
1973 we have lived in a house that my husband designed and built. (He
has designed and built three houses). We love living in this part of
the world and will stay here as long as we can. Living in a university
town with a School of Music, in part, is what keeps us here.
Until June 2011 when I took advantage of Indiana University’s early
retirement plan at age 75, I worked full time 29 years in the
Assignment Section for IU’s Residential Programs and Services. In
addition to that full time work, I taught part time at night for 20
years in the Monroe County Consolidated School Corporation's Adult
Basic Education (ABE). Earlier in my life I taught five years full time
in church schools for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, usually in
multi-grade situations. I got an MS in Education from IU in 1976 when I
was 40 years old. I earned two Life Certificates for teaching -- one
from Michigan and one from Indiana.
My husband and I have three children, five grandchildren, and one great
grandchild who are scattered from Indiana to Washington State to
Honolulu, Hawaii. Our son (who served five terms as a Representative in
the Hawaii State Legislature and is now in his first term as a state
Senator in the Hawaii State Legislature) and his wife (who is Director
of Communications for David Ige, Governor of Hawaii) who live in
Honolulu, Hawaii, have been with us on a number of mostly stand-by
overseas trips -- Germany, England, Wales, Scotland, Greece, Denmark,
Sweden, Russia, Latvia, Vienna, Leipzig, Patmos, Hydra, Samos, Ephesus
(Turkey), Prague, Luxembourg, Belgian. When we went to Alaska in 2011
we could say we had been in all 50 states.
My husband, a retired college mathematics professor, recently finished
the writing of a book entitled "Euclidean Geometry and its
Subgeometries." Altogether there are four authors: Edward J. Specht,
Harold T. Jones, Keith G. Calkins, and my husband, Don Rhoads. The
first two authors are now deceased. This book had its beginnings over
40 years ago, as a set of class notes by Specht.
The original manuscript was handwritten, so the first job was to put
the entire thing into computer language-no small feat; this was
accomplished by Keith Calkins. The publisher with which Don and Keith
were negotiating, Birkhauser/Springer, wanted the length reduced from
760 pages to 500; Don accomplished this by eliminating several
peripheral chapters and moving these chapters and the solutions to the
exercises to a separate manuscript, which will be posted on the
Springer website. Books published by Springer never go out of print.
Any book can be produced on demand.
The book was published, 1 1/2 years ago. The authors see this book as
the last word on Euclidean Geometry. One reviewer claims: “This is the
most detailed undergraduate textbook on the axiomatic foundation of
Euclidean geometry ever written.”
Together my husband and I wrote a book entitled “Modesto: Tales of Life
in Southern Indiana.” The book, a history of the original neighborhood
in which we live, grew out of materials gathered for a paper I wrote
for a class in Indiana Folklore while working on my MS in Education.
The people who bought the book are mainly from this neck of the woods,
as it were. It is a case that the “outsiders” were the ones who pulled
the information together through oral interviews, official documents,
old maps, newspaper articles, etc. It helped that my husband’s
brother, James Berton Rhoads, was head of the National Archives at the
time we were writing. There are now 4 official highway department
signs marking the boundaries of Modesto. Modesto never was a town,
just a neighborhood, but it has been on Indiana road maps all these
years.
And that is my “last word” for the time being.
Jean (Schlunt) Rhoads
[email protected]
Revised July 7, 2017
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