Biography

I grew up in Alliance, Ohio, two hours southwest of Erie.  I joined the Department of Mathematics here at Gannon in 1999 and have recently stepped down as department chair.  My wife Kristin and I celebrated our 20^th anniversary in the summer of 2012.  We have two teenage children and two extremely silly shih tzus.

My biggest claim to fame on campus is probably my appearance as a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2004.  I was also a contestant on Jeopardy! as a graduate student, and I’ve written articles about the mathematics of both shows for Math Horizons.  I am fascinated by history and love music from classical to jazz to rock.  I am a life-long Cleveland fan who, understandably, will sometimes focus on soccer or hockey, sports with no Cleveland team to let me down.  I have been fortunate to do much traveling.  Two places particularly special to me are Japan, where my wife once taught English, and the Great Lakes region as a whole.  I have lived in Michigan and Ontario and along Minnesota’s Lake Superior shore, so I have seen the lakes from all sides and discovered many wonderful spots along the way.

Educational History

• University of Michigan, Ph.D., Dissertation: Reduced Expressions in Infinite Coxeter Groups, 1994
• Case Western Reserve University, B.S., 1989

Professional Experience

• Associate Professor, Gannon University, 2007-present
• Assistant Professor, Gannon University, 1999-2007
• Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, Duluth, 1996-1999
• Post-Doctoral Fellow and Part-Time Lecturer, University of Waterloo (Ontario), 1994-1996

Publications

• Who Wants to Be a Half-Millionaire?, Math Horizons, February 2007, 16-17.

• Fibonacci and Square Numbers, Convergence, posted September 2006, http://mathdl.maa.org/convergence/1/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=1296

• How I Lost On Jeopardy!, Math Horizons, April 1999, 27-28.

• On a Family of Hyperplane Arrangements Related to the Affine Weyl Groups, Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics 6 (1997), 331-338.

• On Young’s Orthogonal Form and the Characters of the Alternating Group, Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics 5 (1996), 127-134.

• R-Sequenceability and R*-Sequenceability of Abelian 2-Groups, Discrete Mathematics 131 (1994), 345-350.

• A Counterexample to a Voronoi Constellation Conjecture, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 37 (1991), 1665-1666.

• Harmonious Groups (with R. Beals, J. Gallian, and D. Jungreis), Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A 56 (1991), 223-238.

• The Duluth Undergraduate Research Program in Mathematics: A Participant’s Perspective, in Models for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics, ed. Lester Senechal, 103-4.  Mathematical Association of America, Washington, 1991.