The Early Years (Precalculus)
I was born and raised in Lapeer, Michigan, a moderately-sized city in the thumb area of Michigan. If you’re not sure what the “thumb area” is, simply look at the palm of your right hand. That’s what (the lower peninsula of) Michigan looks like. Pretty much anyone from Michigan will explain his or her location in this way. For reference, Lapeer is about twenty miles east of Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, and seventy-five miles north of Ann Arbor.
Author at age two
As a small child, it’s probably fair to say I didn’t have a head for math, so much as a head for a much larger body. As the picture to the right illustrates, at the age of two my head made up nearly half the mass of my entire body. Despite my giant head, I didn’t qualify as an exceptionally talented and gifted elementary school student. I mean this quite literally. My elementary school, Mayfield Elementary, had a program called TAGS (Talented And Gifted Students), and I wasn’t invited until my final year (sixth grade). That also happened to be the year they greatly cut funding for the program: they went from dissecting eyeballs the year before I was invited to simply drawing in blank notebooks the year I participated. Come to think of it, maybe I wasn’t really in TAGS after all.
The Wonder Years (Calculus & Number Theory)
Author at age fifteen (dramatization)
I attended Lapeer West for high school, and that is where I really began to take an interest in math and the sciences. At the time, I was fairly certain I wanted to be a mad scientist, which I took to mean “make weapons for the government”. This seemed to fit with my activities in TAGS, which mainly involved my drawing elaborate contraptions for brewing “molecular acid.” After graduation, I attended the University of Michigan. Initially, I planned to major in math and physics— the cornerstone subjects of any mad scientist’s studies —but by the end of my first year I discovered an innate dislike for the world of units (meters, joules, etc.) and so switched my interests to purely math. And by purely math I mean Pure Math, as opposed to Applied Math, which wandered too closely for my tastes to the world of units. I took as many pure math classes as I possibly could over the next three years, and slowly began to think of myself as a budding little number theorist (due in part, no doubt, to the excellent teachings of Trevor Wooley). As graduation neared, I planned to continue my life as a permanent student by attending graduate school in mathematics at Stanford University.
The Age of Enlightenment (Algebraic Geometry)
Andrew Schultz, Ravi Vakil and author (Stanford graduation)
At Stanford, my interests gradually turned from number theory to algebraic geometry, beginning with a reading course on the subject led by Ravi Vakil. Before long, the beauty of algebraic geometry, combined with Ravi’s energy and enthusiasm for the subject, fully persuaded me to choose it as my specialized field of study. These same qualities convinced my friend and classmate, Andrew Schultz, to specialize in the field as well, and in the summer after our second year at Stanford we became Ravi’s first officially-advised students. In May of 2007, after three more years of intense study, we graduated from Stanford. Huzzah!
The Modern Era (Tropical Geometry)
After Stanford, I obtained a VIGRE fellowship for a three-year post-doctoral position at the University of Utah. During my first year at Utah, I taught a pair of undergraduate calculus courses while I continued to work on and extend the results in my Ph.D. thesis. I also participated in an exciting weekly research group focused on Gromov-Witten theory and Bridgeland stability, working with Aaron Bertram, Y.-P. Lee, Arend Bayer, Joro Todorov and Yunfeng Jiang.
I spent the next year on leave from the University of Utah, the fall semester of 2008 as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Washington (at the generous invitation of Sándor Kovács) and the spring semester of 2009 in Berkeley at MSRI (for the giant algebraic geometry program).
I returned to the University of Utah in the fall of 2009, and my research interests gradually turned to the rapidly developing field of tropical algebraic geometry. Working with Aaron Bertram and graduate student Dylan Zwick, I’m currently working on a handful of tropical projects, ranging from weights in the tropical Grassmannian to ranks of divisors on metric graphs.