Miller also sometimes angered his colleagues because he charged that most faculty were not rigid enough and that students were not learning enough. Miller taught for a time at UCLA but opted for the then small junior college that was El Camino in 1952 because he did not want to be in a big, remote institution.Ĭolleagues recall that Miller could be a terror in the classroom, intolerant of misspelled words or misplaced punctuation. Miller amassed a collection of Einstein memorabilia that included a copy of Einstein’s birth certificate. The most important intellectual association of his life was formed in 1950, when he went to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., and became a student and friend of Albert Einstein, his idol. Army Signal Corps civilian physicist during World War II, held fellowships in physics at the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and was a Ford Foundation Fellow at UCLA. He wrote 700 letters before he landed his first teaching job, at a private school in Connecticut. It was the Depression and, failing to land a teaching job, he and the woman who was to become his wife of 52 years became butler and maid for a wealthy Boston doctor, earning $30 a month. He left Boston University with degrees in philosophy and theoretical physics. He had some of his greatest successes in Australia, which he visited more than 20 times, lecturing to large audiences, doing television and even posing for splashy Cadbury chocolate ads.īorn in Billerica, Mass., Miller grew up in a hard-working farming family and once said he learned the rigors of precise, disciplined thinking from his teachers and his mother, whom he described as “a Lithuanian peasant who spoke 12 languages.” By the time he was 16, Miller said, he had “read the (town) library dry.” He also appeared on television with such late-night stars as Steve Allen and Johnny Carson, wrote eight books and published more than 300 papers in professional journals.Īctive around the world even after his official retirement at age 65, Miller gave thousands of lectures inside and outside the classroom and made hundreds of television appearances. I'll bet that Professor Julius Sumner Miller would not be impressed.Dressed in a dark coat and open-collared white shirt, Miller made 40 appearances on Walt Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club” and also did a children’s record series for Disney on history’s great scientists. These days the sticky laptop keys are so annoying I've (shock horror) let mistakes remain uncorrected more than a few times. It became a major yet unofficial part of my job to make corrections. My working years were spent where clear and concise English was essential. It makes me wonder: if someone in say a signage company sees a mistake, so, do they approach the client to suggest correcting it.or just do it exactly as it came to them? Or maybe they too think it no longer matters. I'm talking about what's said on TV (like gotten), in the newspapers and especially in signage and even catalogues. My pet hate is not where individuals make mistakes but when the mistakes are probably subject to review.and are not corrected. In other words he doesn't have to bother worry about accurate spelling.not that he ever really did. ![]() ![]() He loves new technology and SMS and all that stuff because (and I quote) 'No one cares anymore about spelling, it's the changing face of English.' blah blah blah. I had a message from him recently where 'you're' was used instead of 'your'.sigh. I was actually thinking of a family member who did finish 6th form.but for whom near enough was always good enough when it came to spelling. BTW this is balanced by not being so hot at Maths. I didn't finish high school (I quit near the end of 5th form (year 11) to go to TAFE) but English was my best subject.
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