Saint Michael's College

Title: Professor of Mathematics

Education: B.S., M.S., Ph.D. University of Connecticut

Areas of Expertise/Research Interests: My background is in the Theory of Computation. In addition, I administer the CTAN archive of software for the TeX typesetting system at www.ctan.org.

Testimonial: The liberal arts spirit of inquiry means that classes have the freedom to visit areas that most interest students.

What is your favorite class to teach, and why? One of the core intellectual issues of our time is the exploration of the power and limits of computation. That's what we focus on in Theory of Computation. We go back and forth between pure theory - for instance, the Halting Problem or Kleene's Theorem - and how that theory plays out in practice (here, virus checking or self-reproducing machines and POSIX regular expressions). Besides, it is my specialty!

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