AlgDesign 1.1-7.3
====================

* Jerome V. Braun volunteered to maintain the AlgDesign package.

Robert Eugene Wheeler Obituary
==============================

November 28, 1931 - June 28, 2012

An avid bicyclist for 50 years was struck by a car on the morning of June 28th. 
Born and raised in Missouri he served in the Air Force for 10 years stationed in 
Texas and Alaska. He received a Masters in Mathematics from the University of 
Chicago. He was employed by the Illinois Institute of Technology and DuPont Company 
prior to starting ECHIP which specialized in experimental design software. He retired 
in 2005. His wife and two sons predeceased him. He is survived by his brother 
Richard Wheeler of Kearny, Missouri, a daughter Cynthia Jenison of Princeton, NJ 
and three grandchildren.

[http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/delawareonline/obituary.aspx?pid=158344424
Retrieved September 29th, 2014]


Wheeler, Robert Eugene
==============================

Bob Wheeler

As written in his own hand.

November 28, 1931 - June 28, 2012

He was born with a caul which gave his grandmothers and other old wives in the family 
something to talk about for a while. It was purported to show the child was destined 
for great things, no doubt tracing back to Julius Caesar who was reputed to have 
been born with one. His life, however, was fairly ordinary, with some ups and downs, 
but nothing of great note.

He was born in his maternal grandparents' home in St. Joseph, Missouri, on the evening 
of November 28th 1931, in the midst of the great depression. Hospital births in those 
days were a rarity and indeed were dangerous places as they had been for several centuries, 
so it was just as well that he followed a long family tradition in this regard. His 
grandparent's on both sides had been farmers in Northern Missouri, and the story is 
that his paternal grandfather, Charles, upon hearing of his middle name remarked 
that "U" was a strange initial for a child to bear.

He possessed many memories from his first year, long before his brother (Richard) was 
born, and recalled his homesickness when he stayed at his grand¬parent's farm during 
his mother's confinement. He started school at five, and clearly remembered the fun 
he had taking the entrance test which consisted of placing brightly colored cubes 
in slots. He often felt that this early start was a disadvantage because he was always 
younger than his classmates. He walked to school, some eight tenths of a mile, since 
busing was unknown in those days, and remembered the trips with joy, especially since 
he often walked part way with a girlfriend, Dixe - they held hands.

The war came, and his father, Jack, became a machinist and took a job at the Pratt 
and Whitney plant in Independence, MO. There they lived across the street from the 
two room school where he took classes. After the war they moved to Kansas City where 
he went to high school at East High. He was a poor scholar, considerably bored with 
the classroom experience. He would usually read the text during the first week or so 
of school, and then fail to complete the homework assignments. He kept busy however 
with part time jobs - theater usher, grocery clerk, pin setter in a bowling alley, 
and in his last year in high school, as a lab assistant at Midwest Research Institute. 
He also built things. He carved bows, made arrows, joined an archery club, ground a 
mirror for a four inch reflelecting telescope, and spent time at the library trying 
to learn Egyptian Hieroglyphics, which last impressed a few business men so much 
that they sponsored his attendance at Boy's State; which was mostly a young politician 
training ground, and for which he had no taste. When he turned seventeen, he quit 
school in 1948, before graduation, because he could and because his grades were very poor.

He spent nine years in the Army Air Corps, which later became the Air Force, first, at 
Lackland AFB near San Antonio Texas and later at Elmendorf AFB near Anchorage Alaska. 
In neither case did he do traditional military things. The psychologists who constructed 
aptitude tests, recruited him because of his scores on the tests, and they had 
persuaded the Air Force to supply military personnel to assist them. For the next 
six years spent his time among the psychologists at the Human Resources Research Center, 
which gave him a bent for statistics, and encouraged him to write a couple of papers. 
During this time he married and they had a daughter (Cynthia). As is the case with the 
military, he was transferred out of this snug nest into the cold of Alaska, where he 
was a duck out of water. He was met upon arrival by an impressive senior sergeant who 
was expecting a skilled office manager because of the military specialty number that 
had been assigned to him - there was consternation on both sides. Fortunately the 
sergeant knew of a couple of odd ball civilians in the command building who were looking 
for some help with their Operations Research activity; and so it happened that he 
spent the next three years doing the sort of mathematics that had been popularized 
during the war as an aid to command decisions.

As a result of this experience he developed certain skills and contacts which led him 
to enroll at the University of Chicago and to work for one of these contacts, the 
Institute of Air Weapons Research, part of the applied research arm of the University. 
Since he had no academic record, he took a series of tests and was admitted to the master's 
program in the Statistics Department, where he took his degree in 1960. (He was required 
to take a course in humanities before moving on to the master's program, since admissions 
though he was a bit weak in that area.) After obtaining his degree, he worked for a time 
as a statistician at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and then struck out on his 
own as a consulting statistician; which wasn't much to his liking since it involved 
becoming a salesman for his services - he likened it to a funnel with the need to find 
new clients to pour into the funnel to make up for those lost.

In any case he joined the statistics group of DuPont in 1962, and stayed with them until 
1981, when he left to form his own company (ECHIP). One of the reasons that he left was 
because he was unable to persuade DuPont management to support the coming revolution in 
personal computers - later on they turned out to be one of his customers. He had just 
turned 50 and was eligible for early retirement which provided health insurance for his 
family, which had expanded to three children with the birth of Ralph and George in Chicago. 
The principal product of ECHIP was experimental design software for personal computers, 
which was quite a new thing in those days. ECHIP was the first software to employ 
algorithmic experimental deign. It had a modest success, and at one time had an income 
of a million dollars a year. He grew bored with it and retired at 65, turning the 
management over to others. Competition and other things caused revenues to decline until 
in 2005, at an annual meeting, he discovered that company had accrued considerable 
unsecured debt. He closed the company in 2006 after paying off all creditors.

During his time with DuPont, he published a number of papers; they are honest contributions 
to the literature, original and interesting, but of no great moment. He was involved with 
computers from the beginning: from punched card tabulators in the Air Force to the 
earliest machine language computers at Chicago. He became a useful programmer using 
several languages from the first Fortran and Unicode implementations to more 
sophisticated languages as the field grew. He programmed the ECHIP software in C, 
mostly to avoid any suspicion that he was copying Fortran code he had developed 
while at DuPont. Later he contributed several widely used packages to the R archive: 
algorithmic design, permutation tests and relative risk. He wrote a number of programs 
for bicyclists; the first ones were written for individual computers, but later they 
were mostly web based involving many computer languages.

He had many other interests, among which were fishing, guns, photography and bicycling. 
More often than not, he obtained his greatest pleasure from the technical aspects of 
his hobbies. He made rods from bamboo, tied flies, loaded his own ammunition and ran 
experiments on shooting precision and accuracy, developed and printed his photos, 
wrote a technical paper on large format photography, and built bicycles. He was a 
founding member of the White Clay Bicycle Club, and rode his bicycles until the end, 
although he did slow down in later years.

He was interested in everything and was able to converse on many topics, adapting 
himself as needed to the occasion. He was ignorant about sports and never had a 
taste for religion. Interestingly, he decided at the age of seven that religion 
was foolishness. At a later age, he concluded that life on Earth was nothing 
but the natural combination of positive and negative elements; that the apparent 
complexity was no more than what should be expected given enough time, and that 
the human mind is nothing but an example of this complexity with its "logic" 
an elaborate collection of rules of thumb - this is hardly a unique view, even 
though many fancy otherwise.

His wife and two sons predeceased him. His daughter carried forward some of his 
genes into the next generation, which is the purpose of it all.

(07/02/12)

[http://www.delmarvaobits.com/posts.cfm?obit=35076
Retrieved September 29th, 2014]
