I received my A.B and M.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 and 1978 respectively. In 1982 I earned my Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Utah. After receiving my doctorate I was awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship which allowed me to visit the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Subsequently I held positions at Rutgers University, Oregon State University, and Pomona College before coming to Pitzer in 1989. I have spent time visiting the University of Melbourne, Australia, the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, California.
I teach a variety of lower-division courses ranging from the traditional precalculus-calculus sequence to much more unusual courses designed for the liberal arts student, such as
I also teach the following upper-division courses, each in alternate years.
Course descriptions can be found under General Teaching Information.
My research interests are primarly in knot theory and low-dimensional topology. Over the last several years I have collaborated on the tabulation of all prime alternating knots through 18 crossings and prime nonalternating knots through 16 crossings. (This began as a project with six high school students at Claremont High School .) Together with Morwen Thistlethwaite, we have written a program called Knotscape that allows ready access to the knot tables as well as the computation of various knot invariants such as skein polynomials, representations of the fundamental group of a knot into permutation groups, and a number of hyperbolic invariants. I have also worked on skein modules of 3-manifolds and other problems that arise from the study of the skein polynomials of knots. Most recently I have become interested in hyperbolic knots and various geometric knot invariants such as the A-polynomial of knots. Most of this work has been in collaboration with Pat Shanahan of Loyola Marymount University.
For the next three summers (2005-2007) I will be working with undergraduates on research projects through the Claremont Colleges Mathematics REU Site.
While on the faculty at Oregon State University, I supervised Helmut Doll's master's thesis.