Acknowledgments                        

As a mathematician might put it, the author of any book is necessary but not sufficient. It is my pleasure here to thank all those who, while quietly nameless elsewhere in Mrs. Perkins’s Electric Quilt, made contributions that significantly and materially aided the emergence of a book from a sheaf of notes. My wonderful editor at Princeton, Vickie Kearn, got the project going by offering a contract after reading my proposal. Two reviewers of the first draft of the book made it better; one wished to remain anonymous, and so I am limited on this score to thanking Lawrence Weinstein, professor of physics at Old Dominion University. The staff I worked with at Princeton University Press, Debbie Tegarden, Anna Pierrehumbert, Carmina Alvarez-Gaffin, and Dimitri Karetnikov, were terrific. Marjorie Pannell of Chicago, the book’s copyeditor, did a similarly outstanding job.

At home, my wife of forty-seven years, the lovely Patricia Ann, maker of beautiful quilts and dispenser of the common sense I sometimes lack, kept me on an even keel whenever I ran into a period of depression after my writing hit a speed bump. And when I needed a nonjudgmental pal, my three furry buddies, Heaviside (the immortal cat—she’s twenty-three!), Maxwell, and Tigger, reminded me that sometimes all you really need to make the next technical breakthrough is a sleeping cat on your lap.

Paul J. Nahin
Lee, New Hampshire
January 2009