Fall 1998

Book projects expand horizons

While Christmas shopping in downtown Chicago, a Rose-Hulman student browsed through the latest academic selections at Borders Bookstore.

Suddenly a familiar name caught his eye among the list of recently published authors: Richard Ditteon.

He was intrigued. This couldn’t be the same Richard Ditteon who was his physics and applied optics teacher in Terre Haute.

Yes, Ditteon (Physics, ’74) had joined a growing list of Rose-Hulman faculty who have written textbooks, books and other scholarly publications during the past five years. Along the way, they’re spreading a message about the high level of expertise among the college’s faculty. “As an author, you become part of the national or international circle of people interested in the same subject,” says History Professor William Pickett, who has earned the Board Of Trustees’ Outstanding Scholar Award after writing historical biographies of president and military leader Dwight D. Eisenhower and Indiana U.S. Senator Homer Capehart. “Writing a book that receives good reviews gives you credibility among your peers. It’s a gratifying experience.” Ditteon’s textbook, “Modern Geometrical Optics,” was published in 1997. Like most textbooks, it resulted from his own frustration about not having a quality resource guide to assist his teaching of geometric optics, ray tracing, optical aberration and lens design.

“At the time, textbooks were too general and didn’t deal with how we taught the subjects here,” says Ditteon, a faculty member since 1984. “I put my own notes into a bound form and distributed it to my students. They liked it and offered improvements. I decided I might have something that could help my colleagues.”

That was 1987. The book finally made bookshelves 10 years later — after two publishers, several updates of WordPerfect word processing software and advances in classroom technology.

Jack Kinney’s mathematics textbook, “Probability: An Introduction with Statistical Applications,” also resulted from the need for an adequate textbook to teach his courses.

“It was written for my students. We needed something that was fresh, exciting and packed with more practical examples,” said Kinney, whose textbook includes more than 800 examples and problems. “We also needed a textbook that utilized current technology.”

The multimedia approach may be the key for success in a textbook about digital signal processing that was written by Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering Professor Mark Yoder and colleagues James McClellan and Ronald Schafer, both of Georgia Institute of Technology. “DSP First: A Multimedia Approach,” published earlier this year, is a class-tested learning package that features integrated laboratory projects relating to music, sound and image processing.

It also comes with a CD-ROM that was Yoder’s major contribution to the three-year long project.

Edward Lee, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California-Berkeley, supports this new educational approach. The college is changing its electrical engineering curriculum to learn from the “DSP: First” educational system. It isn’t alone. Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Tulane, George Mason and the University of Oslo (Norway) plan to adopt the system in the near future.

Yoder’s textbook has a long way to go to top the success of Professor Ralph Grimaldi’s textbook, “Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics: An Applied Introduction.” Now in its third edition, the textbook has received praise by mathematics professors throughout the world since its orignial publication in 1985. It has also been translated into Spanish.

“I had no idea of what I was getting myself into. It seemed like a monumental task,” says Grimaldi, a faculty member since 1974.

Through the encouragement of Professors Al Schmidt, Jack Kinney and Gary Sherman, Grimaldi agreed to provide Mathematics Department Secretary Mary Lou McCullough with three pages each weekday and five pages each weekend.

“After awhile we were working on Chapter 10. We had a party to celebrate getting into double digits,” the humble professor stated. Another party came in 1985 when the textbook arrived at the Mathematics Department offices.

“I’m glad for the recognition I received from my colleagues. The book would have been impossible without Mrs. McCullough,” said Grimaldi, who is currently working on revisions for a fourth edition.

Pickett believes that writing a book, like his 1995 autobiography “Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power” and his unpublished manuscript “A Transcendent Duty: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Decision to Run for the Presidency in 1952,” benefits students in his Rose-Hulman classes.

“I have new insights into history that, I hope, gives my classes immediacy and interest they otherwise would not have,” says Pickett, who may still hold the record for spending the most time reviewing items in the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kan. “It’s fascinating to shed new light on the events of the past. My goal is to draw my students into this process so that we learn together.”

— by Dale Long

Check out a list of books by Rose-Hulman professors