was no surprise to me. It showed he knew a lot of
algebra and could skip the first algebra class.
That was the first case of advanced placement I
ever heard of. 
Anyway, I always liked math. But
various counselors told me that I couldn't have a
career in math because I was blind. I heard this
from so many counselors that I believed it. After
all, there's a saying, "If three people tell you that
you're drunk, you'd better lay down." So I majored
in psychology. I got a B.A. in psychology from
Brooklyn College and an M.A. in psychology from
Columbia University. But it wasn't so easy to get
a job as a psychologist either. I got a job at the
AFB but not as a psychologist. My first wife, Florence, who died in 1970, knew how much I loved
math. She asked, "Wouldn't you rather be an unemployed mathematician than an unemployed
psychologist?" So I started taking math classes at
night at Brooklyn College and then got the teaching position there. I worked toward a Ph.D. in
mathematics at Columbia University. I got a
mathematics teaching job at the University of Detroit and finished my Ph.D. at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Q. How did your Braille math code become an official code?
A. Another blind employee at AFB was Dr. Clifford
Witcher, a physicist from Columbia University.
One day he asked me if I had a table of integrals
in Braille. I said that I had one, but it was in my
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