biography

 

"... and there was nothing beautiful and enviable that she did not plan and wish and dream for the little one. A stone house with plate-glass windows and a fountain in the garden seemed to her just barely good enough for him, and as for his career, he had to become at least a professor or a king."

- Hermann Hesse, Augustus

"I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember... their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

 

I was born one day after James Lighthill's birthday and one day before that of Joseph Lagrange.

I grew up in the lower Hudson valley, close enough to New York City that you could climb a tree on a hill to see the skyline in the distance. I graduated from Cornell University in 1991 with a BS in mechanical and aerospace engineering and moved to Pasadena, California; I finished my PhD in mechanical engineering at Caltech in 1998. After a year as a postdoc in control and dynamical systems at Caltech, I moved to the San Francisco Bay area and spent two years in the biological systems modeling group at Entelos, Inc. I moved to central Illinois in 2001; I've been an assistant professor in what's now the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois since then.

I live with two cats, maybe forty guitars, and innumerable books.

Interestingly, perhaps, my doctoral advisor was Richard Murray, whose advisor was Shankar Sastry, whose advisor was Charles Desoer, whose advisor was Robert Fano, whose advisor was Ernst Guillemin, whose advisor was Arnold Sommerfeld, whose advisor was Ferdinand Lindemann, whose advisor was Felix Klein, one of whose two co-advisors was Rudolf Lipschitz, one of whose two co-advisors was Lejeune Dirichlet, whose two co-advisors were Simeon Poisson and Joseph Fourier, who were both advised by Lagrange, whose advisor was Leonhard Euler, whose advisor was Johann Bernoulli, whose advisor was his brother Jacob Bernoulli (does that seem fair?), whose advisor was Gottfried Leibniz. Klein's other co-advisor was Julius Plucker, whose advisor was Christian Gerling, whose advisor was Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose advisor was Johann Pfaff.

My Erdos number is currently four. I wrote a paper with Jerry Marsden, who wrote a book with Michael Hoffman, who wrote a book with Allen Shields, who wrote a paper with Paul Erdos.