David Haines, mathematics professor and department chair, remembers his colleague and friend, the late Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Richard Sampson:

Had you been a math major a few years ago, you would have spent a lot of time talking to and about Richard Sampson, who died April 1, 2004.

Students told colorful stories about Sampson's classroom behavior: throwing chalk and erasers at sleeping students, screaming "Damn!" when he got stuck on a calculus problem, and sketching absurdly complicated pictures as he explained the connection between projective geometry and art.

He filled his classes with his own stories. He told one about using the mean value theorem when he was an Air Force meteorologist in the jungles of British Guyana during World War II. His job was to calculate the average temperature over the last 24 hours, which he did by cutting along the temperature recorded by a pen on a piece of uniform density paper, then weighing it.

Another was about flying into hurricanes to measure wind speed. ("Damn, it was noisy when the plane got hit by lightning!") Still another was about throwing dry ice out of an airplane to punch a hole in a cloud so his partner on the ground could use the hole to measure the velocity of the cloud.

Dick created our course "312 Geometry," and today Bates is one of the few colleges with such a course. Because he was a sailor, he also created a Short Term unit called "Celestial Navigation," in which students used astrolabes, compasses and sextants to transport themselves around an imaginary world.

Sampson was fearless, and traveling was an adventure with him, especially when, shortly after takeoff, he would say, with delight, "Now this is the time the plane is most likely to fly apart into pieces!" Once, we landed in the rain at Harrisburg and looked out the window to see sparks coming off the wing tip as it hit the runway. Hands gripping the armrests, I turned to Dick, who was beaming. "Damn! That was close!" he shouted.

Those who sailed with him returned with memorable stories, and we never could quite tell whether he was foolhardy or was just trying to scare the hell out of us.

His craving for challenges carried over into mathematics. He always had a problem he was working on. He would crash into the office uninvited, throw a problem up on the board and start working on it. Despite my attempts to ignore him, he always succeeded in trapping me into an hour-long session of doing what he knew I enjoyed, mathematics.

I once saw this happen on a plane full of mathematicians. Richard, struggling with a problem, couldn't keep the challenge to himself and began walking up and down the aisles accosting other mathematicians, who were soon enthusiastically gathered around our seat, to the annoyance of the flight attendants.

Attending mathematics meetings with Richard was a party. Famous mathematicians of his generation greeted him by name. Dick proudly refused to acknowledge those he deemed too arrogant. But he made a effort to befriend the handful of African-American mathematicians at that time, and it was through his efforts that the mathematics department was able to hire the first African-American to a Bates tenure-track position.

Though he began teaching at Bates over a half-century ago, and retired more than a decade ago, Dick Sampson remains a guiding spirit for our department and College, a model for how we treat each other as colleagues, students, and friends.