When developing the plot for a novel, Rick Harper remembered Karen Johnson from his graduate student days. She was a graduate student two or three years his junior taking different classes from his, and moving with a different crowd; a former graduate school buddy of his remembered that she married Jeff Smith. Karen's olive-toned skin, short wheat-colored hair, and green eyes were tailor made for the character that he built around this image, but Karen was no more than a static memory without a personality. A snapshot and nothing more! To identify the character with the image, Rick called initially also the novel character Karen Johnson, and once he used the name, it stuck and no other name sounded right. "Karen may like to know that she inspired a main character in a novel" said his daughter when he told her that the character in the novel was based on a person of that name: "Why don't you look her up and tell her? She may be thrilled to know that." This is the story of that search for Karen Johnson that took him to cities in Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.
About the Author: I arrived with my family on the shores of Palestine during the Arab riots of 1936 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. I am a veteran of the Israel War of Independence, for which I was awarded the Independence ribbon. In my home town Tel-Aviv I studied fine art and graphic design in my youth at the Urwand Studio, and have worked as an illustrator and commercial artist in both Israel and the U.S. As a member of thar studio I worked on the planning and preparation of graphic materials for the 25th Anniversary Exhibition of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I also designed and executed exhibitions in Tel-Aviv and produced book illustrations, including children books. Concurrent with artistic activities I studied mathematics at The Hebrew University, coming to the United States in 1955 to pursue my graduate education; I studied at Columbia University the University of Maryland, from which I earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. My scientific work includes six books on mathematics published by Harper and Row, Academic Press, and Dover, and articles published in mathematics and neural network journals. Fiction writing interspersed with mathematicalresearch began in the 1980s, leading subsequently to the completion of an autobiography and five novels within the past ten years. During this period I continuedpublishing articles on neurall networks and ahistorical study: From algebra to computationalalgorithms, soon to appear in print. I live in New York next to one of two daughters from a previous marriage and her family; my other daughter lives in Syracuse in upstate New York.