Who am I? Why am I here?
I started out as a child; most of us do. (Apologies to B. Cosby.) Technically I am a native of Ohio (Akron, to be precise), but I grew up in Massachusetts and am still attempting to come to grips with the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004. I have been teaching at GRCC since 2005. Prior to that, I spent nine years teaching at Yakima Valley Community College in Grandview, Wash., and a year teaching mathematics and coaching track and field at a "co-ed day and boys boarding" school for students with attention deficit problems, learning disabilities, and different learning styles in Atlanta, Ga. I have a master's degree in mathematics from Florida State University and bachelor's degrees in mathematics and French from Michigan State Univeristy. (Go Spartans!) I was a fair bit better at French, but math, obviously, was way more fun. I'll have plenty of time to be a linguist in a future life. In previous lives I have been, among other things, a Zulu warrior, a minor king in Inner Mongolia, and a 16th-century Welsh peasant.
My current professional interests center on the mathematics of social choice, with particular attention to the apportionment problem and the mathematics of voting. I also enjoy "stupid calendar tricks," Simpson's Paradox, and the Traveling Salesperson Problem, though I make no claim to be any sort of expert in any of those. I am the immediate Past President of the Washington Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (WAMATYC), and did some work with the Transition Math Project. And of course, I'm always intrigued to stumble across new (to me, at least) things which are unexpected and yet reasonably obvious once one thinks about them a bit. (For example, I recently encountered and, with the help of Messrs. Hallstone and Nelson, proved the fact that a quadratic polynomial with exclusively odd coefficients can have no rational root, a fact which was almost certainly well-known, but not to me.)
Pedagogically, my goal is for my students to feel the same way about their mathematics that I felt about that discovery. Okay, so it wasn't original to me, or even particularly noteworthy, but it's still really cool. I want my students to realize what they've accomplished and to be proud of it.
My off-the-job interests would have to start with animals. I am currently the human of four cats (Pythagoras, Geneva, Victoria, and Calliope-Roberta), plus the neighborhood felines who drop by to mooch meals. I have provided foster homes for cats in the past, though I am not currently doing so, and until her recent death, I also harbored Gretchen, a very sweet, very slobbery St. Bernard who was bigger than me and who had an excellent mastery of analytic geometry.
I enjoy playing in my garden as well. Favorite crops include tomatoes, cherries, strawberries, peas, sunflowers, pumpkins, and zucchini (just because it's so easy to grow them that I can't bring myself to buy them). I make an annual summer pilgrimage to Yellowstone National Park to hang out with the bison and see the geysers. Victoria, B.C. is my favorite city; see the name of Cat #3 above.