[vox] Passing of Richard Harke

[Peter Salzman]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 8:16 PM, Nick Schmalenberger
<nick at schmalenberger.us> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 10:39:40AM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
>>
>> I'm sad to learn that Richard Harke died earlier this month.
>> His wife Sue reached out, so I could share the news with
>> other LUGOD members.  She also writes:
>>
>>   I could use the help of  your group to find a home for his itanium computer.
>>   I don't think it belongs in the dump (I don't know the password to get on
>>   anyway).  I also have a number of books that your group might like to
>>   distribute, rather than my giving to the library.  I'm sure a group member
>>   knows how to reformat hard drives and make the computer work for him or her.
>>
>>   I think Richard would be please to have the books that he prized so much
>>   find a good home.
>>
>> If anyone here is interested in these, let me know, and I'll put you in
>> touch with Sue.  (IIRC, she's out in Sacramento, FYI)
>>
> Its pretty sad to hear. I remember a few meetings where he and
> Jeff DeFay were the only non-officers (maybe it was the one where
> we got all the Sybase tshirts). What a good guy he was :)
> -Nick


As with many PhDs, he never lost the grad student's almost wide-eyed
wonder of physics.   Fun guy to talk with, and really smart.
Obviously haven't spoken to him for years, but I remember he liked
talking about geometric algebras like Clifford algebras.  Kind of a
unique / quirky research topic.  Fun stuff.