What was Haskell Curry's hair color?

February 10, 2018 4:11 AM

Haskell Curry was a mathematician who worked in logic; the Haskell programming language was named after him, and a way of defining functions known as "currying". Unfortunately, all of the pictures of him I can find are black-and-white, so I can't tell what color his hair was -- could be blonde, or just gray! Please help.

If anyone happens to either know his hair color, or know a simple way of looking it up, that would be much appreciated.

It is entirely possible that he never had color photographs taken of him until he was very old, which is troubling. I don't know if state records would have included this kind of information.

Failing actual confirmation, maybe somebody could take an educated guess from the b&w photos?

posted by vogon_poet to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

Total guess, based on people with similar coloring, he was blond and when he got older his hair turned white.
posted by mermayd at 5:26 AM on February 10, 2018

Judging by his apparent age in that photo and the shade of his hair and eyebrows, I'm confident in saying he was blond.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:20 AM on February 10, 2018

Best answer: I looked on ancestry.com. There are some younger photos of him uploaded there, and his 1923 college yearbook photo (still b/w) shows him with darker hair.
His World War I draft registration card (age 18) says he has brown hair.
His World War II draft registration (age 42) says he has gray hair.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:20 AM on February 10, 2018 [9 favorites]

I emailed you a few pics from the yearbooks.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:35 AM on February 10, 2018

Response by poster: Thank you!

Brown hair is the correct answer, apparently, and he must have just gone gray very early.
posted by vogon_poet at 4:26 PM on February 10, 2018