George White

— 50th — (2022) Joseph Biden

The constants through my life have been dogs, bicycles, co-ops, and cornmeal-braid bread. Jordan W hit three of the four, and we did often have visiting dogs.

I quit Harvard rather abruptly after the departure of my faculty advisor, who left the country to rather than comply with the order to report for a draft physical. and my own order to report for a draft physical in Albuquerque. That was one test I was happy to fail.

I went on to do a PhD in Applied Math and Ecology at Cornell, were I met an married an extraordinary woman, Christine Nielsen (who does not like having her picture taken). She is sitting next to me in this photo with Jeff's wife and kids. Chris too had lived in a co-op dorm at Union College. Cornell graduate students often shared houses with rotating responsibilities for cooking much like the Jordans. The Moosewood Cafe was driving force behind the local food co-op. From Ithaca we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I taught math at Dalhousie University, then moved to the Bedford Institute of Oceanography. There I remained until my retirement over 35 years later.

From my father, also an applied mathematician, I learned that applied maths provides opportunities to dabble in many different scientific fields. As an undergraduate, I volunteered for one summer and was then hired for a second summer at the New Mexico State Environment Agency. There I did modelling of air pollution plumes from mine-mouth power plants, testified as an expert witness, and helped design a long-term program monitoring visibility impacts in the Rio Grande Valley. In Canada I have worked in fisheries and ocean remote sensing (the latter is based in the same radiative transfer concepts useful in air pollution modelling), but one of my favourite papers applied game theory to a model for the evolution over time in the formation and dissolution of fishermen's cooperatives in Nova Scotia's herring fishery.

I retired in 2018 with Chris and 4 dogs, to a new (and still not entirely completed, thanks to COVID) "forever" home in the small farm community of Berwick, Nova Scotia. Like Jordan W in 1970, Berwick can be characterized as a having "Protestant crust with a crunchy granola underbelly".

These days, my body often reminds me of John Kenneth Galbraith's remark: "Growing old is hell, but it sure beats the alternative". The world to me is the ultimate reality show and I want to see what happens next, so I plan to live forever or die trying.