With two mathematicians, Thomas Bond Sprague and Hermann Amandus Schwarz, as grandfathers, Roland Sprague was also a great-grandson of the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer and a great-grandson of the musical instrument maker Nathan Mendelssohn (1781-1852) [REF].
Sprague is known for his contributions to recreational mathematics, especially the Sprague-Grundy function and its application to combinatorial games, which Sprague and Patrick Michael Grundy discovered independently in 1935 and 1939 respectively [REF].