A bit about me
The gist of it is that I'm married and have two cats and a dog. I like to listen to techno music, drink good beer, climb mountains and go on road trips. Of course, I like to do math. A slightly more verbose version of this follows.My family
My immediate family consists of me, my wife Sondra, our two cats Mitz and Moon, and our dog Piko (featured in some of the photos above). We've had Mitz since about 2000, and Moon since 2003. We got Piko in 2012 after we moved to Washington.
I was born and raised in Minneapolis, where much of my family, and many of my oldest friends still live. I have two sisters and a brother.
Media
I listen to music almost constantly. When I was a kid I was really into the Minneapolis punk music scene. Nowadays I listen to mostly electronic music. It is easy to listen to and work on math at the same time, because there are no words. Some favorite music producers are Siriusmo, Boards of Canada, Xploding Plastix and Jody Wisternoff. When I'm not listening to weird techno music I'm probably listening to old Hip Hop (almost always Souls of Mischief), or classical music (I'm partial to J.S. Bach's partitas played by Glen Gould).
I like to watch good movies, and since TV shows are the new movies, I like good TV shows. Clearly, The Wire is my favorite TV show. My favorite movies include Fanny and Alexander (a pretentious sounding choice, but a true favorite) and Dazed and Confused (a less pretentious choice).
Before I did a lot of math I used to read novels. Not so much anymore, but my favorite book is probably The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky. I also used to draw and paint a lot, and before I did math I wanted to be an artist. I liked to do figure drawing with vine charcoal and other media.
Mountains
Since moving to the west coast in 2009, I try to spend as much of my time as possible in the mountains. When I was in California this mostly meant the Sierra Nevada, but now that I'm in Washington I visit the Cascades about once a week. I like climbing mountains. Typically most of what I do is rated class 3 or under, and I also have basic snow climbing skills. The coolest mountains I've climbed are Mount Shasta (14k ft), Mount Baker (11k ft) and the South Sister (11k ft). These are all Cascade Volcanoes. In the upcoming year I hope to add many more of these volcanoes to the list, in particular Mount Saint Helen and Mount Adams since these don't require crossing any glaciers, and I can take Piko in winter. I hope to further develop my glacier skill too.
My wife and I like to road trip to across the Western US, which brings us to various mountains, deserts and, less often, the Pacific Ocean. Since the quarter system has Veteran's Day off, we've made a tradition of November road trips. We went to the Grand Canyon the first year, to Zion the next and last year to Banff. In 2013 we'll visit Oregon, hitting up the Three Sisters, Crater Lake and then the desert. We love visiting primitive hot springs, and have essentially ruined our tiny Chevy Aveo doing so (it's worth it).
