People We’re Forgetting
In 2026 we’ve gotten so used to being able to look up information about individuals via social media, Wikipedia, and other sources that it’s quite jarring when you discover people who are in some sense well known but just aren’t there. Lately it struck me that there are a number of people from the latter half and earlier in the 20th century that would be far better documented if they had just lived today. They’re not super famous people like presidents or Nobel Prize winning authors or scientists, but they are mid-level people about whom there would be a lot of information today. State legislatures, authors, scientists who weren’t necessarily Nobel Prize winners but did important work. Here are just a few examples of people I would really like to know a lot more about, but as far as I can tell, the information just isn’t there.
Mary Boas, a physicist who wrote a very popular undergraduate text on mathematical methods in physics. Records are a little hazy, but she was one of the first women to receive a PhD in physics from MIT. She taught physics at DePaul University in Chicago for thirty years. She retired in 1987 and thus seems to have missed out on the Internet and the Web in her professional life. Aside from her textbook, I can find out almost nothing about her research or professional life. Her son Harold is an accomplished mathematician in his own right, but because he’s a few decades younger than his mother, naturally, his work and his life and his professional career is much better documented today. Just compare their Wikipedia articles.
Ruth McKenney, a political organizer and New Yorker contributor who today is best known for various movie and TV adaptations of her book My Sister Eileen. For that matter, I’d also love to know more about the short life of the real life Eileen. About 20 years ago, I actually wrote and contributed the very first Wikipedia entry about Ruth McKenney.
Frank Bonham, an author of Westerns and young adult novels. According to Wikipedia, Bonham wrote 48 novels, as well as TV scripts. A lot of the books he wrote for children were amazingly popular back in the 70s and early 80s, including The Rascals from Haskell’s Gym. I didn’t read that one when I was a child, but I read The Missing Persons League multiple times, and that book stuck with me for decades even after the point when I could no longer remember who wrote it. A few years ago, I was surprised to discover that several other books I remembered very fondly from childhood were all Frank Bonham books. He wrote in a variety of genres and on a variety of topics so he didn’t stick with me quite as strongly as a person or an individual or an author as someone more focused like Isaac Asimov. He died in 1988, and now there’s almost nothing about him to be found anywhere. You can still find many of his books in old paperback editions that used bookstores. But as far as learning anything about the man himself? Who seems like he must have been a pretty interesting guy? Bupkas.
There’s a whole cottage industry dedicated to identifying the various uncredited actors in Casablanca. Can you imagine an actor getting even a bit role in a picture like that today and not being all over Instagram?
There’s a really interesting comparison between two famous mathematicians who are known for their linear algebra textbooks: Paul Halmos and Gilbert Strang. Halmos (1916-2006) was one of the Martians of 20th century mathematics. In addition to his two famous textbooks, he wrote a really good automathography called I Want to be a Mathematician which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the practice of research mathematics, mathematician or otherwise, and that gives us a good sense of his personality. That’s more than most 20th century mathematicians get. However I can only find one actual recording of him talking, a random guest lecture he gave to one of Donald Knuth’s classes in the 80s. That’s it. Maybe there are some others sitting in the archives of some university waiting to be posted on YouTube one day. We can only hope.
Compare him to Gilbert Strang, another author of classic linear algebra textbooks and very well respected teacher and mathematician who has had a similarly long and productive career. What mainly distinguishes them is that Strang was born a generation later, and thus his classes are all over YouTube. In a hundred years he will be far better remembered than Halmos not because he’s a better teacher or mathematician (they’re both excellent) but because he worked at a time when the Internet had become the primary communication mechanism for scholars, scientists, and mathematicians.
Here are a few other20th century people who had extraordinary and continuing impact through their works:
* Murray Ralph Spiegel (1923-1991)
* George B. Thomas Jr. (1914–2006)
* Zenith Brown (1898–1983)
* Silvanus P. Thompson (1851-1961)
* Mildred Parten (1902–1970)
How many do you know? How many can you find learn more about than a single paragraph of rote CV data?
In some cases, it’s possible their children or descendants might have more information, and I’d love it if they compiled these and put them together to think more about them. There’s such a strong recency bias in the information we have available to us today. People who are famous enough to be in major published books, be they presidents or Nobel Prize winners or Oscar winners, are reasonably well documented if you go back to the paper sources. But so many lesser actors, authors, scientists, engineers, plumbers, parents, city council members, and more people from almost any walk of life you can imagine are not, unless they have contributed to the world in the age of the internet and social media.
