[[Updated September 2018]] Greetings! I arrived at Williams in 2008. I've known several graduates and
members of the faculty for years, and my family and I are excited to be part of
the community. We joined the 5 College area in Fall 2011 (with my wife teaching
at UMass and me taking sabbaticals at Smith and Mount Holyoke), but are now
happily back. I'm currently the faculty program director for
Spencer
Neighborhood and the faculty chapter president of
Phi Beta Kappa (as well as
national Senator At Large).
I wanted to briefly introduce myself by providing some personal and
professional information. I received a BS in Mathematics and Physics from Yale
in 1996, and then earned a PhD in Mathematics from Princeton in 2002. Since then
I've taught at Princeton, New York University, (The) Ohio State University (GO
BUCKS!) and Brown. I'm married; my wife
Liz is a
professor of Marketing at UMass Amherst, and we have a 10
year old son Cameron and a 7 year old daughter Kayla. I grew up just outside Boston. My
hobbies outside math include tennis, sailing, reading (primarily historical
fiction, politics and science fiction), Boston sports teams, bridge and
twistie art. In previous years I served
as faculty advisor to the Brown chess club, and I currently maintain a
math riddles page (which is
usually among the top ten hits when googling math riddles; it's being greatly
improved by three Williams students as part of the
WIT program, and is online at
mathriddles.williams.edu). I'm also an
early riser, and enjoy starting the day by having
breakfast with friends (I'm
currently the President of the
International Federation of Collegiate Breakfast Clubs, so if you're ever in
Oxford and want a free meal, let me know!). For the past N summers I've
run an undergraduate research group as part of
SMALL here at Williams, as well as
serving as a research mentor to high school students at the
PROMYS program at BU and talking at
Hampshire College's program. I also
now serve as an elected member of the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee.
One of the reasons I love studying math is that there must be a reason for
each answer, and that reason is not 'because I said so!'. I find it amazing that
many very different phenomena can be explained by the same basic equations (for
example, the same math used to analyze the Fibonacci numbers 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,…
can be used to teach you why playing roulette at Vegas is a terrible idea;
click here for a short
video I made with OIT on the subject). My
main research is in number theory and probability, especially some problems on
the boundary of math and physics. For example, there are many similarities
between the behavior of primes and the energy levels of heavy nuclei such as
Uranium! This is a specific example of a very general phenomenon, namely how
results and observations in one field can suggest problems (and sometimes
solutions) in another. In addition to research in pure mathematics, in the last
few years I have written papers in accounting, baseball, computer science,
economics, geology and marketing. I've supervised over 200 undergraduates in the
past 10 years (several of whom only knew basic calculus), and I try to have open
research projects in my classes. If you are interested in undergraduate
research, please drop me a line -- I'm interested in almost anything that
relates to math (for those interested in a senior thesis or colloquium,
click here for a more detailed list). Some of my
current projects with undergraduates include a collaboration with the San Diego
Padres (I'm a huge Red Sox
fan, but some of my students are
Yankee fans, so we figured this is a nice, neutral team) and working with
the IRS
to detect tax fraud, as well as some problems in number theory and dynamical
systems. I've written a number theory book (the
link will take you to a webpage with links to some student reports and
background papers), and am currently writing a probability book with a Williams
student.
I've taught many classes over the years; links to them
are available from my main homepage (also the more recent classes now have
all lectures freely available). These include operations research, lego bricks,
star trek, cryptography, complex analysis, number theory, advanced analysis,
multivariable calculus, ....
Looking forward to meeting you.
Link to my
weekly schedule
Return to
my homepage
My
constant TAs / family.
Phi Beta Kappa: Senator-at-Large:
2018--2024 