I am a Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University, on leave from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

My research interests are in combinatorics, probability, and dynamical systems. You can look at my resume (last updated February 2002) as either a Postscript file or pdf file to find out more about what I do, and you can look at my most recent grant proposal to find out (some of) what I want to do next.

During the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 academic years, I will run a program called Research Experiences in Algebraic Combinatorics at Harvard ("REACH"), in which I will enlist the aid of undergrads and graduate students in the Boston area as partners in my research in combinatorics. (This semester we created a tee-shirt summarizing one of our major findings.) In coordination with running REACH, I taught a combinatorics course in Fall 2001, (Math 192r), to serve as sort of a feeder for students involved with REACH. In Spring 2002, I taught a section of calculus. Additionally, I had strong ties with the department's preceptor group, and helped with teacher training. To get a sense of my style and philosophy of teaching, you can look at something I wrote the last time I applied for a job that required a "teaching statement", as well as a list of things I usually say on the first day of class. During the 2002-2003 academic year, I will be a non-teaching visiting professor at Harvard, teaching two courses each semester at Brandeis University.

I moderate two email forums: the "domino" forum (founded by Greg Kuperberg back in 1993), which is dedicated to a particular flavor of research combining combinatorics, probability, and statistical mechanics (called "domino" because domino tilings of plane regions is one of the main topics), and the "bilinear" forum, which is dedicated to sequences and arrays satisfying various sorts of quadratic recurrence relations (e.g., Somos sequences), and the combinatorial objects that these sequences and arrays enumerate. The domino forum is private, but you can look at the archive of the bilinear forum.

Preprints and reprints of many of my articles are available on-line. So is software related to my interest in the "vant" (a cellular automaton invented by Chris Langton) and its variants, and my interest in enumeration of tilings.

My biggest current project is a book on Fermat's Last Theorem (for the scientifically interested public), to be published by Princeton University Press in 2004, entitled "Who Proved Fermat's Theorem?: The Curious Incident of the Boasting Frenchman." I don't have a draft available that I'm ready to circulate, but in the meantime you can check out a short article of mine entitled "Fermat's Last Theorem and the Fourth Dimension".

I've collected some pointers to interesting mathematical Web-sites.

If you like puzzles, click here.

How many college professors does it take to change a lightbulb?

If you have any suggestions for this web-page or questions about my work, send me e-mail.

Last updated April 17, 2002