“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

Who Is This Person?

A native of Berkeley, California, educated there and at Swarthmore College, Harvard University, and Northern Arizona University. For a bit less than thirty years, a college professor.

Formerly active in the American Association of University Professors, a local humane society , and various fraternal and service organizations. Formerly also a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Internal Auditor. Now retired and writing, which is way more fun. If I’d realized retirement was this nice, I would have skipped the working phase and gone straight from education into retirement.

As a college professor, my research interests were primarily in the history of human information systems - for example, I wanted to know what the average householder or merchant of eighth-century Britain knew, and how he or she came to know it. I was particularly interested in how Roman numerals really worked, and why they were eventually replaced by the now-familiar “Arabic” ones. (Hint: the use of Roman numerals was intimately bound up with the use of the abacus, and you probably have in your house an abacus of the kind used with Roman numerals. Second hint: it took Roman school children about half an hour to learn all the arithmetic needed for daily life. For them, arithmetic was so easy that no one bothered to mention the subject.)

During my professor days, I was the author or co-author of assorted textbooks and articles; the texts were mostly about computing and are now obsolete. In those days I was also a member of more academic societies and associations than was probably good for me.

I speak / write / read various languages, such as German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, and Hittite.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me