Howard E. Brandt, Ph.D.: Personal recollections

Soon after joining the Signal Processing Group of Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland (ARL-Adelphi), in 1983, I happened to be walking down one of the many hallways of ARL-Adelphi when somehow I met up with Howard Brandt. After a brief exchange of the usual initial greetings, our conversation turned to a discussion of his research work in relativity. I soon learned that his research was on a generalization of general relativity along the lines of Kaluza-Klein theory. Instead of the usual spacetime metric tensor, he was focusing on a metric tensor that not only involved spacetime, but also included four velocity and Andrei Sakharov’s maximum acceleration hypothesis. This in turn led to a spacetime manifold based on Finslerian Geometry. We decided to continue our conversation in the ARL cafeteria. Over a cup of coffee, he queried me about my research interests. So I in turn talked about my research program in algebraic and differential topology and higher-dimensional knot theory. Much to my surprise, he was intensely interested, frequently interrupting my explanation with delving questions. And so a long-term friendship was born.