Rutherford Aris, pt. 3

While Aris was a noted chemical engineer, remember that it was one of his side projects, paleography, that developed into full blown expertise and elevated him to polymath status.

He developed his interest in ancient scripts, the shapes of letters, and calligraphy when he was on sabbatical at Cambridge University in 1964. At Cambridge, he attended the paleography lectures of one of the leaders in the field, Cambridge professor T.A.M. Bishop, and was bitten with the letter bug.

He ultimately became a leading scholar in the field, and was appointed a professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Near Eastern and Classical Studies, where he became most well known for his two books on ancient scripts, an index to a book on first millennium Latin scripts (An Index of Scripts in E.A. Lowe's 'Codices Latini Antiquores,' Pts. I-XI and Supplement) and a history of Latin scripts from the first through the fifteenth centuries (Explicatio Formarum Litterarum (The Unfolding of Letterforms from the First Century to the Fifteenth)).