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I was born in Bloomington, Indiana, on March 18, 1969, and grew up in the lovely town in south central Indiana that is home to Indiana University. From an early age, I knew I loved two things: soccer and science. In the meantime, I've kept these while exploring a number of others. School and studies have taken me to upstate New York, southern California, Hawaii, and central Virginia. Now I live and work in Champaign, Illinois, which shares much of the charm of Bloomington (Indiana) but lacks essentially all of the nice scenery. I share my living space with a bunch of plants and a couple thousand books.
I'm an astronomer and physicist by training and a mathematician and computer nerd by inclination. I attended Indiana University part-time while a student at Bloomington High School South (1987), and completed a BA in Physics at Cornell University (1990). I then completed a MS (1993) and PhD (1996) in planetary astronomy at the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences of the California Institute of Technology.
Since 1999, I have authored and maintained Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics and Eric Weisstein's World of Science, the world's most extensive and popular internet encyclopedias for math and science. These sites are sponsored and hosted by Wolfram Research, where I hold the official title of "encyclopedist". Since 2002, development of MathWorld has also been sponsored in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation through a National Science Digital Library grant to the University of Illinois and Wolfram Research on which I and my colleague Michael Trott are co-PIs at WRI.
I am also involved in the development of Wolfram Research's world-class mathematics program Mathematica, which is an indispensible daily tool in my efforts to communicate math and science. I also oversaw the development of the Mathematica Information Center, a large repository of documents and programs using Mathematica.
Previously, I was research scientist in the astronomy department at the University of Virginia, where I was also system administrator for the department's Suns, PCs, Macs, and SGI. In addition, I provided instrumentation support for the department's 26", 30", and 40" telescopes, as well as its new CCD camera.
For my thesis work at Caltech, I built (with Gene Serabyn) a millimeter/submillimeter Fourier transform spectrometer which was used for astronomical and planetary spectroscopy at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. My thesis "Millimeter/Submillimeter Fourier Transform Spectroscopy of Jovian Planet Atmospheres," was done under Dewey Muhleman, and I worked closely with Gene Serabyn, formerly of the Caltech Submillimeter Astrophysics Group.
I am the author of the MathWorld and ScienceWorld websites. MathWorld is equivalent to more than 4,000 printed pages of encyclopedic material. ScienceWorld current stands at the equivalent of about 1,000 printed pages.
A book version of my mathematics website was published by CRC Press in 1998. In early 2000, CRC Press filed a lawsuit against me and my employer seeking to (1) either grab control of the website or shut it down, (2) grab as many dollars as possible. I have chronicled this sad saga in my author's note and detailed narrative. I highly recommend these documents to budding authors or idealistic lovers of science as an example of what you should be prepared to deal with (or better yet, should be prepared enough to avoid) should you be successful in your own labors of love.
If you are really curious (or brave), you can click for my CV or publications list.
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