Dear Members of the Faceting World, it is with regret to announce
that Fred Van Sant died on Sept. 6, 2003. There will be no obituary,
per se, that was Fred’s wish, and the daughter’s will abide by his
wish. However, in order to celebrate a remembrance of such an
important person as Fred was in the faceting world, I have permission
to collect anecdotal from any of you who would like to
respond. You can either send your stories to me for a collection to
be published, or you can send them to either Jeff Ford or Thurmond
Moore for their daily faceting lists.
I will send my collection to the USFG Newsletter, to both USFG and
Lapidary Arts Faceting Lists, and more importantly, I think, to the
two daughters of Fred as a memorabilia contribution of their beloved
and most extraordinary Father.
Like the following: Did you know that Fred never took an advanced
math course in this whole life? If he wanted to master Calculus,
he found a Calculus text and mastered the subject. He learned so many
different approaches to mathematics in the same manner that he ended
up inventing a whole, complete, NEW approach to mathematics based on
NEGATIVE numbers. The approach was never presented to the math
world, simply because the mathematical PhD’s who read the approach
could not comprehend it. That was one Fred’s many phenomenal gifts.
Sincerely – Charlie Moon – clmoon@pacbell.net