Geometer Remembered

:: some pythonic math ::

I just today learned from David Koski that Russell (Rusty) Towle was killed in a car accident in August of this year.

Russell kindly helped me in my early work with POV-Ray, the free ray-tracing tool, pointing out that I had the wrong aspect ratio, making my polyhedra look squashed, like on this page. He showed me how to fix the problem. Russell was a master of the mathcasting genre.

I've also mentioned him in my Beyond Flatland essay (1998) for his early work on the Waterman Polyhedra. The guy got really around, touched the lives of a great many people with his exquisite craftsmanship.

His family and friends put together a blog in his memory, which I've been enjoying. Stephen Wolfram also had Rusty on his radar, given all those colorful zonohedra in Mathematica.