Reading Euclid’s Elements in Greek

Paul Bamberg received an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard in 1963 and a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford in 1967. For 28 years he taught the premedical physics course in Harvard College, the Extension School, and the Summer School, while building up the computer science program at the Extension school and teaching assembly language programming and data structures.

Bamberg retired from teaching in 1995 to devote himself fulltime to speech recognition research at Dragon Systems. In 2000 he unretired and returned to Harvard in the mathematics department. Since then he has done his best to make upper-level mathematics courses available to Extension students. He received the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award in 2005, the Dean's Distinguished Service Award in 1995, and he was honored for 25 years of Extension teaching in 1994. Prospects for a second retirement are dim, since his new appointment runs though 2020.

Graeme Bird studied classics and mathematics in New Zealand, earning his BA and MA (along the way also obtaining a bachelor's in divinity degree from London University), before coming to the US in 1981 to pursue his interest in jazz piano. He earned his BM in film scoring and jazz piano from the Berklee College of Music, then taught high school Latin and mathematics before getting his AM in linguistics and PhD in classical philology from Harvard. He has been teaching for the Harvard Extension School since 1986. He also teaches linguistics and classics at Gordon College, north of Boston, and assists with the jazz band. Bird's interests include finding connections between the ancient Greeks and music, particularly the poetry of Homer and jazz improvisation; he also explores in his course the ways in which the Greeks saw mathematics and music as a way of understanding the cosmos. Bird also teaches at the Harvard Summer School, where he thoroughly enjoys helping his students, both local and distance, gain confidence in their ability to use and appreciate the practicality and also the beauty of mathematics.