Biography

Don Rhoads taught at Andrews from 1962 to 1972.  After a 26 year hiatus, in which he ran an electronics business in Bloomington, Indiana, he returned to Andrews in 1998.  He chaired the Department of Mathematics from 2000 to 2006, when he retired.  He and his wife Jean live near Bloomington.  He loves music and the arts, supports environmental causes, and maintains a tall-grass prairie on his property, with a profusion of wildflowers. Among his heroes are Jimmy Carter, Johann Sebastian Bach, and his great colleagues at Andrews.

He is particularly delighted that many different ethnicities are represented by the students in the Department he once chaired, and that so many of them are women. The old stereotype of mathematics as a European-male-dominated profession is being broken big time at Andrews.

Current Research or Professional Activities

Since his retirement, Don has collaborated with Dr. Keith G. Calkins (of Ferris State University) to bring a new book to publication, Euclidean Geometry and its Subgeometries. Work on this volume was started in the early 1970s by the pioneering Andrews mathematicians, Edward J. Specht and Harold T. Jones; it was published at the end of 2015 by Birkhäuser, an imprint of Springer.