Cleve

Cleve died and I didn’t thank him enough. On Hacker News, I wrote:

Cleve was chairman of the C.S. department at the University of New Mexico from 1980 to 1984. I got my MSCS there in 1985, in a large part thanks to Cleve. I never took any of his courses, but I did speak to him off and on, because he was friendly, approachable and was an advocate of me being allowed into their Masters program.

On a couple of occasions Cleve mentioned that he had fairly significant troubles sleeping and I was impressed by how well he performed with so little good sleep. Turns out, I had undiagnosed sleep apnea myself that only got worse over the years (until I had three surgeries to significantly reduce it). During my bad apnea days there were times where I pulled myself together and rallied by remembering Cleve. I’ll never be able to repay Cleve for what he did indirectly for me, much less what was direct and deliberate, but I do try to help others and will remain inspired by him until my brain no longer processes.

It’s all true, but there’s a little more behind the story. I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, nor did I have a high school diploma. I had actually dropped out of my high school as a senior in Durham, New Hampshire, in order to take the GED and get into the University of New Hampshire a semester early. That went well until I was denied entry into the UNH Computer Science’s bachelor’s program due to “lacking the mathematical maturity” necessary for their program.

It’s a long story, but Cleve (a half a country away) believed in me, and I was able to use a Vietnam-war related exception that allowed people with real-life experience to bypass a bachelor’s to petition and go directly into graduate school after a vote by the professors. I managed to get in by one vote. Without Cleve’s support, there’s no way I’d have gotten in.

A zillion years later, my mechanical engineering major daughter asked:

So dad, do you know anything about Matlab?

Well, sort of…