DR. D. M. reminisces
OWN the hall of the second floor of the Old Shop Building came the man we had been waiting to see. As he came within hearing distance of us, he started grousing about the low caliber of the present-day engineering students.
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"If they don't do something about improving the background of the students we're getting from the high schools, the Tech diploma is going to be on its way downhill. I can't, for the life of me, understand why they don't teach a good review course in Algebra in the senior year of high school. There should be a law requiring all high school seniors planning to attend engineering schools to take such a review. Instead they teach them that "darn" trig course in the high schools. It isn't worth a toot. Better that they never had trig till they get to college. The high school course just confuses them. Algebra is the thing to teach in high school. Been saying 10
Two months from retirement time, the Dean of Southern mathematicians takes a long look back at his forty-one years at Tech that for a long time now, and it doesn't look like I'm impressing anyone. Oh well, I can quit worrying about them in J u n e — I'm finishing up then, you know." We told him we knew that the Spring quarter would be his last as a mathematics instructor at Tech. In fact, that's what we came to see him about. We wanted to put down his memoirs of the old school. We assured him that the alumni would be interested in what he had to say. He came back with a typical D. M. Smith answer. "It's about time they were interested in what I had to say — enough of them went through my math classes without hearing me."
Forty-one years in front of the blackboard hadn't dimmed the Doctor's wit or clouded the sharp blue eyes that are Tech's favorite mathematics professor's trademarks. The Doctor picked up the conversation. "I came to Tech in the fall of 1913. I had been teaching at the University of Chicago and working there on my Ph.D. After I started teaching down here, I went back to Chicago every summer to work on my degree. I finally received it in the fall of 1916. The whole time I studied at Chicago, I THE GEORGIA TECH ALUMNUS