The mysterious Mr. Graham (Q316838)

In 1959, Dover published a collection of `Ingenious mathematical problems and methods' (reissued in 2012), by an author who only told about himself to direct a business producing control system for rotating machinery, and beyond that a monthly newsletter with 25,000 recipients in the U.S. The problems had first appeared in this newsletter's `Private corner for mathematicians'. The author of the paper under review got puzzled, and once retired, he has managed to solve the puzzle about the identity of Graham -- a crucial step being the discovery via web references that Charles Mingus's wife was Graham's daughter. Graham was born as Louis Grossbaum in Birmingham in 1892, came to the U.S. in 1901 (being soon naturalized), graduated from DeWitt Clinton High-School in Bronx in 1907, and from Columbia University in mechanical engineering in 1913, having also received the John Dash Van Buren, Jr., Prize in Mathematics. During WWI, he served in the Corps of Engineers, and worked as an engineer after having left the army in 1919. Already before the war, he had changed his surname to Graham, just as his cousin Benjamin Graham né Grossbaum, a renowned financial analyst -- these were times where it was rather more unhealthy for a career to be Jewish in the U.S. than in Germany. In 1930, he had become vice president of the Relay Motor Company. At some moment during the 1930s, he founded Graham Transmissions. He died in 1966; his book [Surprise attack in mathematical problems. New York, NY: Dover Publications (1968)] appeared posthumously. The paper under review ends with an analysis of a problem appearing in both collections, about two ladders of unequal length standing across a road against walls. This intricate variation of a very classical problem type leads to a fourth-degree equation, and the 1952 book shows how it can be solved by a fairly fast iteration instead of by the Cardano-Ferrari formula; the second indicates a different method (suggested by a reader of the newsletter) making use of trigonometric tables.