I am an Associate professor of Mathematics/Computer Science and New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and the chair of the interdisciplinary New Mew program. My professional interests have evolved considerably over the years, veering from pure mathematics towards computing and new media. My current interests center on exploring ways to use new Internet technologies to effect social change. This usually takes the form of conceptualizing, designing and developing social software that addresses a particular need such as promoting ride-sharing or social skills in autistic children.

I did my graduate and post-doctoral work in Harmonic Analysis and the Interplay between Harmonic Analysis and Probability. My interest in computers goes back to the early '60 when I would help my father haul cartons of punch cards to the local Control Data (The Sun Microsystems of it's day) computer center on Saturday mornings. In those days using a computer meant renting time on a mainframe that usually took up an entire room.

Keyboards replaced punch cards midway through my undergraduate days in the 70's and I ended up with a minor in computer science. I think I did this more as a back-up strategy than anything else as at the time I was focused on pure mathematics. I worked as a scientific programmer to help pay my way through graduate school in mathematics (Harmonic Analysis) in the early 80's but never found it very rewarding.

My present fascination with computing and new media traces back to the late 80's when fellow mathematicians began finding new applications of Harmonic Analysis to solve problems in image processing. But the real moment of revelation came with my first encounter with the Netscape web browser in 1994.