In 1983, I began work on my dissertation, “Families of Hypersurfaces with One-dimensional Singular Sets”, at Duke University. In that paper, I attempted to describe two numbers which one could effectively calculate from the defining equation of a hypersurface with a one-dimensional singular set – two numbers which control the topology and geometry in a similar fashion to how the Milnor number controls the topology and geometry for isolated hypersurface singularities.