Category: Mathematics

This is arguably a poorly formed concept since its meaning can vary wildly depending on the referent of “you” but, hey, if Mr. Tozier is silly enough to tag me I’ll play along :-).

1. I’ll start with something really random and meaningless: I have short pinkie fingers Actually, the fingers themselves are proportional to my other fingers, but there’s something a little off in the bones of the hand and both my pinkies start “too soon” and thus end about a joint short when compared to their neighbors. Its not exactly a big deal, as I didn’t even realize it until I was 13 or 14, when my piano teacher and I noticed it when I kept doing long reaches with my fourth finger insead my fifth. While I’m sharing trivial physical abnormalities, I also have a slightly curved spine, and smaller feet than expected for someone my height. My mother blames it all on smoking enthusiastically during both her pregnancies.
2. I’ve only considered leaving UMM once since coming here in 1991. As a Reed (math) grad, I had always dreamed of helping found the computing department at Reed. They weren’t kind enough to set something up just as I was coming out of graduate school :-), but did advertise for their first computing faculty a few years after I came here and I couldn’t resist the opportunity. I didn’t even make the interview, but I have no regrets. I’ve been (and continue to be) really happy here at UMM.
3. Like Bill, I read very slowly, although I think in different ways than Bill. I read slowly to begin with, and tend to do lots of daydreaming and thinking about what I’m reading on top of it. This is one of the reasons I’m a crap citizen of the blogsphere and related on-line worlds. There’s just way too much great stuff out there, and I’m way too slow a reader to stay on top of them. I suspect that’s one of the reasons I like Flickr; I can process a lot of images in the same time it would take me to read a fraction of PeeZed’s output.
4. Dr. Seuss (and my son) helped me learned to sing. I’d always enjoyed music, but only started singing with any regularity when Sub-Evil Boy was born; it was nice singing to an (infant) audience that was so wonderfully non-judgemental. Reading lots of Dr. Seuss at the same time also taught me volumes about timing and rhythm. While I don’t miss diapers, I definitely miss reading to him every night.
5. I have an Erdős number of 4. (Go to the Erdős Number Project for more info on how to compute your own Erdős Number.) The cool thing for me isn’t the number itself, but that it was lowered from 5 to 4 by a UMM alum (Nick Hopper) who I did research with when he was an undergraduate with. He went from here to CMU, where his advisor (and co-author) was Manuel Blum, who has an Erdős number of 1. Absolutely one of my highlights of my career at UMM, and I suspect this will be as low as my Erdős number ever goes. Rather remarkable it’s apparently the same as Bill Gates, but I suspect there are precious few other similarities between us.

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