Personal background

I come from a family with deep mathematical interests. My father was a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania. My mother currently works with computers in the school of arts and sciences at Penn, and she has a Web page, but it's outdated enough that I've removed the link. I have one brother, Jeff, who completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. He is teaching at Georgia Gwinnett College (a recently formed college). I was an undergraduate at Williams College. Among other things, while I was there, I participated in the Putnam Exam and was a Putnam Fellow my senior year there.

After that, I was a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. remarkably quickly (although I know some people who took less time) and worked with Persi Diaconis. My Ph.D. thesis involved probability on finite groups. For a service which provides various probability abstracts, click here. For the Probability Web home page, click here. Another area of interest involves hyperbolic 3-manifolds. For some information on SnapPea, a computer program which computes various properties of these manifolds, check out Jeff Weeks' home page.

Since receiving my Ph.D., I have worked at a number of places. I spent 3 years teaching in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. I then spent a year at The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications which is located at the University of Minnesota. That year featured the IMA's program in probability. I then taught for a couple of years in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin.

One summer I was at the Park City Mathematical Institute at the Institute for Advanced Study.

I am now in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Some people may refer to the University at Albany as SUNY-Albany even though university guidelines now frown upon such usage.

I have had a Ph.D. student at the University at Albany. His name is Joseph McCollum.

I am a member of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America.

The above material sounds very academic, but as an undergraduate I did have a summer job (and more) programming computers for Market Analytics near Philadelphia.