I was born and raised in the nice, quiet (if disturbingly ideologically homogeneous) town of Weatherford, Texas. I graduated from Weatherford High School in 1999, culminating a 13-year career in which I milked my hometown's (generally quite good) public school system for all it was worth. I was first in my class.
I spent the next four years of my life studying mathematics at Texas A&M University. Some interesting (or from the point of view of most Aggies, appalling) facts about my existence at A&M:
* I didn't attend Fish Camp.Suffice it to say that I marched to the beat of my own drum while I was at A&M. Although the above facts may lead my fellow Aggies to believe that I was a boring recluse, I did have several good friends during my time at A&M, some of whom shared my practice of shunning the usual traditions in favor of more nerd-oriented ones. And I owe a great deal of my success to the math professors who spent time mentoring me while I was there: Kirby Smith (with whom I co-authored a paper on quotient rings of the Gaussian integers), Dave Larson (whom I served on several occasions as a teaching assistant), and Ellen Toby (who was my academic advisor for my first two years at A&M). I earned my BS in Mathematics in 2002, and my MS in Mathematics (also at Texas A&M) in 2003.
I am now a Ph.D. student in Mathematics at the University of Texas. Despite the rapidly increasing cost of living in this area, I like it here in Austin. I give back to the community by volunteering as the coach of the LBJ Liberal Arts and Science Academy Math Team. Basically, this means that I give math-inclined students extra problems to solve, and they devour them. I also occasionally bark at them for forgetting negative signs, losing factors of two, and that sort of thing. I'm still trying to find the mathematical analogues of "doing push-ups" and "running laps" so that I can be a more effective disciplinarian, but for the time being, I'm trying to make do with mild verbal abuse.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a program that has had a major impact on my mathematical and professional life: Texas Mathworks. Texas Mathworks is a Texas State University-based program that operates summer math camps for students of all ages. One goal of the program is to develop curricula that introduce students to algebraic concepts and reasoning at an early age. (I actually spent a couple of summers trying to write an Algebra I textbook for students around the age of 10, but since I wrote at a reading level similar to what you see here, most of what I wrote got deleted and replaced. But I hear that they still use some of the problems that I wrote, so it's not a complete waste. I hope.) One of my current projects is to help expand the curriculum for Texas Mathworks' Junior Summer Math Camp. For each of the last few summers, I taught a course in advanced problem solving intended primarily for 7th and 8th graders; my goal is to transform the shapeless mass of ideas I use to teach the course into a well-defined curriculum that others can use.