May this book be Walter Gage’s Holy Grail

I was so taken with Dean Gage’s teaching ability that I took Math 450, Advance Calculus in my final year as an option and absolutely loved it. His memory was unsurpassed and he never used notes and only carried a text book so he could reference the tables.

I still remember to this day how he filled 3 or 4 chalk boards without pausing to show us how the formula for calculating the area of a circle was derived using triple integral calculus…..I was dumbstruck how simple it was…but that was his methodology. As always, at the end of this lecture his dark suit ( he always wore dark suits) was covered in chalk dust. I doubt students today even know what a chalkboard is.

Probably the fondest memory I have of Dean Gage was at my commencement ceremony when he came up to me and my father and started chatting with him like it was just yesterday when he last saw him and not 30 years prior. I only wish I had a camera to record that event.

I once heard on a story tape about a persons quest to find the holy grail and thus the secret to eternal life. After a lifetime of searching, he finally found the secret…..it was in people passing on stories from generation to generation. May this book be Walter Gage’s Holy Grail.