These are quotes from conversations I have had that have shaped my [academic] life. They are not fabrications. Each of them stands out over the last 30 years or so in one way or other -- some funny, some wonderful, some simply wrong, but all influential.

"And this Engineers' Week finalist wants to study Mathematics and Computers in college. Ha. Ha. Ha." Engineers' Week Awards Banquet moderator, 1966. [My prize was a slide rule with a belt-clip carrying case :-)]

"Geometry is not fashionable in mathematics anymore." John Ernest, Mathematics Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1969. [Upon being told that I wanted to study geometry with Professor Coxeter in Toronto.]

"You found out about us in the Yellow Pages? We got this free listing and I couldn't think of anything better than `Mathematicians' since that was what my PhD was in. You're hired." Henry P. Kramer, PhD., Kramer Research Inc, 1969. [My first programming job.]

"I'm going to give you a bonus to quit this job and go back to school and finish your last quarter so you graduate." Henry P. Kramer, 1970. [That bonus eventually became the down payment on our first home.]

"I've never met someone with so little ambition." Max Weiss, Mathematics Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1970.

"Computers can be useful to mathematicians." H. M. S. Coxeter, Mathematics Professor, University of Toronto, 1971. [The opposite view was legion at UCSB at that time.]

"Graduate students shouldn't think about publishing papers [that's what faculty are supposed to do]." Computer Science Professor, University of Toronto, 1973.

"Right now we're interested in `small infinities' as in David Waltz's work. We don't know how to do computer vision on static images yet, so we're certainly not worrying about image sequences." P. H. Winston, Professor, MIT AI Lab, 1973. [I had just decided to work on temporal scene analysis for my PhD dissertation and wanted to be sure no one at MIT was doing the same thing.]

"We saw your dissertation abstract in the list sent from the University of Toronto and thought you might consider applying for an Assistant Professor position at Penn." Aravind Joshi, Professor, University of Pennsylvania, 1974. [Guess what that led to!]

"Our Tutorial Chair volunteer just quit. Would you like to take over organizing the tutorials at SIGGRAPH ''76?" Tom Johnson, 1976. {Thus began my involvement with SIGGRAPH through their exponential growth years 1976 through 1982.]

"You have to growl a lot." Bruce McCormick, Texas A & M, 1980.

"We saw your paper in AAAI '80 Proceedings and thought we would talk to you about using your human models for human factors evaluations in the Space Shuttle." Jim Lewis, NASA Johnson Space Center, 1980. [This started us on TEMPUS and, later, the Jack system.]

"I decided to accept the offer to become CEO [of your Jack spin-off company]." Jim Price, 1996. [Thank you!]