This is what an alumni magazine is for: celebrating students' achievements. Just think of how it felt to see that homework! This is what professors live for. I'm not surprised that Banchoff talked about this whilst receiving a teaching award, since any true teacher knows that the real award is occasionally seeing students like Curtis.
I took this class in the early 1990s; Banchoff was quite an interesting fellow, and excellent at motivating undergraduates. One of the things he offered his honors class was a chance at getting hired to do research as a freshman/sophomore.
He was one of the best lecturers I've seen; he'd collect questions about the previous reading at the beginning of class, and realtime construct a lecture about the material by winding his way through answering all the questions.
The combination was pretty motivating; I spent many hours shading 3d graphs by hand. Mine weren't this nice, but I still wish I had them.
I also took Banchoff's class in the early '90's. It was fantastic, and he had a knack for filling multivariable calculus with excitement. I'll never forget his "monkey saddle" graphs.
That class kicked my ass, but it was one of the most memorable classes that I took at Brown.
He's still doing awesome stuff. See his blog, for example: http://otherthings.com/blog/ (I never knew Cassidy but I studied under Tom Banchoff a few years later, so I certainly knew his homeworks!)
