Hello - I'm Frank!

I was born in Brooklyn, NY and moved to long Island when I was 12.  My dad was a builder and I was a very large 12 year old.  Dad stuck a hammer in my hand and although I never use it anymore, symbolically, it is still there.

By the late '70s I was a small contractor in Suffolk County on Long Island.  On Thanksgiving Day 1979, I had a rather severe house fire.  Of course, I repaired the house myself.  But instead of moving back in, my family and I chose to move to Florida.  On February 1^st 1980 we left New York, bag and baggage, for my brother’s house in Boynton Beach, Palm Beach County, Florida.

I immediately went back to the only thing I knew - construction. 

In 1983 I was introduced to Haydon Cameron. Haydon was a distributor for the original Cambridge Diet which, at the time, was a lucrative network marketing business.  I needed to lose a few pounds…. I lost 75 pounds in a very short time.  I was hooked on the product and on the concept of network marketing. Unfortunately, Cambridge filed chapter 11 bankruptcy a year or so later, leaving all of us “Cambridge Counselors “ without a business.  Haydon went his way and I mine, but we remained close friends. 

I, of course, went back to the only thing I knew - construction.

Fast forward to August, 2009. Haydon again has brought me back to the world of network marketing. This time, there is no chance of a chapter 11 for this company, The Trump Network, is owned by Donald Trump. 

How To Be Good at Mathematics

Most people think that either you're good at mathematics or you're not.....period....end of story. But this is such a defeatist attitude, to say the least. And worse than that, it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
There are several key elements necessary to be good at mathematics, and these are available to anyone who wants to know how to be good at mathematics.

(why is it so) Hard to Say Goodbye (to our jeans?)

Some years ago, I wrote an article was inspired by a feature article in the Living section of The Palm Beach Post. It was around the time that the movie "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" had been released. I noticed a call for stories about favorite blue jeans - it especially caught my eye because it began with the lines from Cat Stevens song, "Oh Very Young".   In this song there is an analogy made between blue jeans and young dreams - how neither last forever, and how mending both along the way make it even harder to let go when the time comes. These lyrics had always resonated with me. I still think that this analogy truly captures the joy of treasuring something, be it large or small, and the pain of losing it.  My story  flowed out of me. It was among those chosen by The Post to be printed in the subsequent feature.  

My Mother's Poetry

I was visiting with my mother recently and the subject of writing came up.  She went into her closet and came out with some papers.  They were things she had written when she had taken a creative writing course about 14 or so years ago.  She was about 75 years old then, now she is 90.

I never knew that she had an interest in writing.  It seems that we don’t stop and think of our parents and what creative outlets they might yearn for. She has resisted becoming acquainted with the computer and all that it offers, so I told her that I would post her poem and her short story.  She seemed so pleased with the idea.  You can read some of her work here.  

My Philosophy of Teaching

“Do not worry about your difficulties with mathematics; I can assure you that mine are greater still.” ~ Albert Einstein  


“Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.” ~ W.S. Anglin


My philosophy of teaching is inspired by these quotes.

Math for Computer Science

Discrete Mathematics is becoming critically relevant to many of the issues that face our society today, and to the technology that is used to address these issues. Not the least of this technology is the hardware and software aspects of computer science - it can be thought of as the language that a computer understands.