50th Anniversary, July 2007

News from Ross Program alumni

Listed mostly in chronological order of the person's first year of attendance at the Program.

Frank-Joseph Papp
email: I was a participant in Dr. Ross' lectures (our famous "Sunday School") sessions in the Nieuwland Science Building on the Notre Dame Campus during the fall and spring semesters from (probably) fall 1957 to my last semester of high school (spring of 1960). During the summer months, we participated in the summer school classes in various topics. Foundational, of course, was Dr. Ross' course on Number Theory (I still have, and treasure, my copy of Elementary Number Theory by J. V. Uspensky and M. A. Heaslet -- amazing book). I don't know how many times in my high school years I heard Dr. Ross' admonition to us to "think deeply of simple things". Great advice that has served me well throughout my mathematical and teaching career. We also had the opportunity to take the Abstract Algebra course with Prof. H. Zassenhaus, Geometry with Prof. A. Goetz, Foundations with Prof. S. Drobot (his son Vladimir Drobot was one of the counselors in the summer of 1963). The summer of 1964 was my last opportunity to serve as a counselor in the summer program.Following high school graduation, I was invited to live on campus during the summer session and serve as a counselor, adviser, someone to encourage and prod the new group of high school students who came to the program (I think someone said that the job description was a bit vague -- it was but it was also delightfully rewarding and stimulating).My career choice and teaching style were directly and very strongly influenced by Dr. Ross. Following graduation from Notre Dame with a B.Sci. in Mathematics in 1964, I studied at the University of Delaware and earned an M.Sci. in Mathematics in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1969. After Delaware, I became an assistant professor at the University of Lethbridge (Lethbridge Alberta) in 1969 and remained there until 1979. While there I was promoted to associate professor (1974) and served one year as chair of the department -- administration is not my favorite, I'd much rather be "doing" mathematics and teaching highly motivated students -- especially number theory. For the years 1979-1981, I served as one of the associate editors of Mathematical Reviews. A position at the University of Michigan-Dearborn opened in 1981 and I have been there to the present. I was promoted to full professor in the department in 1990.Please give my greetings and very best wishes to all the attendees at the upcoming reunion. Those of us who had the blessing and honor to know and learn from Dr. Ross have been given a very special treasure that has deeply changed us -- for the better. The most profound way we can honor the memory of this great teacher is to pass on to others the love of learning, the love of mathematics, and the beautiful admonition to "think deeply of simple things".
Jack Hirschfelder
email
website: http://j2hirschfelder.home.comcast.net: I was in the Ross Program at Notre Dame in 1959 and 1960. After enrolling at Notre Dame in 1961, I worked as a counselor in the program at Notre Dame in 1962 and 1963, then also in 1964 and 1965 after the move to Ohio State. I receive my Ph.D. in mathematics at Notre Dame in 1968, then went to the University of Washington as an Assistant Professor. In 1975, I left academia for industry, where I worked first in software development and later in engineering project management and business development. I retired from industry in 2003, and am now an Adjunct Associate Professor at University of Maryland University College, teaching mathematics and computer science online from my home in Seattle. After a long absence, I have returned to my mathematical roots.It is a bit overwhelming to see that the Ross Program is alive and well after fifty years, and very little changed at that. Looking back over 48 of those, including six years of association with the program, I see that one of the key benefits, in addition to acquiring habits of abstract and precise thinking, is developing skill in precise communication. Years ago, a non-mathematician friend remarked that "mathematicians. . . always say exactly what they mean." A quarter-century in industry has shown me how rare, and how valuable, that skill is -- and it is applicable far beyond mathematics.
Jim Swinger
email: I attended the program in the summers of 1961 and 1962 at the University of Notre Dame. I'll try to be brief.In the fall of 1962, I entered Yale University, which I graduated from in June 1966 with a degree in mathematics. At Yale, I was privileged to take courses from Shizuo Kakutani, William S. Massey, Tsuneo Tamagawa and Oystein Ore among others.A few weeks after graduating from Yale, I began my career with AT&T, which lasted through various reorganizations and spin-offs until just this past May (2006), when I retired from Lucent Technologies. During those forty years I was initially an information technology applications software developer, and then -- for the last twenty-five years or so -- a product manager, planner and competitive analyst for a variety of AT&T and then Lucent commercial products. Since 1990, I have been a Bell Labs systems engineer and then a product manager of telecommunications-carrier grade application software products that enable carriers worldwide to offer advanced telecommunications services to their business customers. From time to time, I have worked on projects jointly with some of the core Bell Labs experts in mathematics and computer science.Thinking about the wonderful learning experience I had at those two summers long ago, I can't help remembering also my 1961 program room mate, Mark Schaefer, who afterward also became my classmate and room mate at Yale. Mark initially majored in mathematics and we often took the same math courses together, but by senior year Mark decided to switch his major to economics. He went on from Yale to earn his PhD in economics at MIT and then went on to teach at Georgia State University, rising to full professor before his untimely death in 1992. Were he alive now, I think Mark would be as eager to attend a Ross Program Reunion/Conference as I am.
Michael Anderson: Michael Anderson was in the program at Notre Dame in 1963 and then at Ohio State in 1964 and 1965 as a student. He was a counselor in 1966-1968. He married Barbara Snow in 1969, and also received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame that year. After receiving his PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1974, he was a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Gibbs Research Instructor at Yale, and an Assistant Professor at Brown. His fields were algebraic geometry and logic. In 1981, he left academia to work in research and development in the computer industry. After working in a variety of jobs in the Boston area, including GTE Labs, he moved to Ann Arbor in 1984 to work for FAME Software, a subsidiary of Citicorp. Michael died in 1991, probably from hepatitis C, as a result of a blood transfusion that he had while in high school.
Barbara (Snow) Anderson
email: I was in the SSTP program at Ohio State in 1964, with roommate was Christine Jones. I met Michael Anderson that summer and we got married in 1969. He died in 1991.
I received my bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1970, and my PhD in Sociology, specializing in demography, from Princeton University in 1974. Since then, I have been a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, an Assistant Professor at Yale, and an Associate Professor at Brown. Since 1984 I have been Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, and Research Professor at the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan. I study the relation between social and economic change and demographic change and mainly have worked on the Soviet Union and the former Soviet Union, China, and South Africa. The summer at Ohio State was very important to me. Although I did not become a mathematician, I use mathematics and statistics in my work every day and have never regretted my math background.
Steve Buser
email: I was in the SSTP program at Ohio State in 1963 at Notre Dame and 1964 at Ohio State. Despite my love for math that Prof. Ross nurtured, I ended up majoring in economics as an undergraduate student and also got my PhD in economics. I returned to OSU in 1975, where I was on the faculty of the Department of Finance until my retirement in 2002. I still dabble in number theory from time to time and was both thrilled and disappointed to learn that Fermat's last theorem had finally been proven. I was also relieved to discover that the proof took substantially more space than the margin of Fermat's book would have allowed. So at least it was not the relatively simple proof that I, and apparently so many others, had been searching for lo these many years. I suspect that Prof. Ross would have had mixed emotions as well.
Christine Jones Forman
email: After the Ross program, I finished high school in West Carrollton, Ohio and began my college studies in Cambridge, MA. Geographically, I've barely strayed from the Harvard campus where I received my AB (1971), AM (1972) and PhD (1974) in astrophysics. I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics, then a Harvard Junior Fellow before joining the Smithsonian at the Center for Astrophysics. My recent research has centered on the Chandra X-ray observatory, successfully launched by the Columbia shuttle in July 1999. I work with my husband Bill Forman, as well as with others from CfA and elsewhere, primarily Germany and Russia. Students from as far as Australia, Europe, England and South America and as near as the Harvard Department of Astronomy have come here to work with us. According to the Astrophysics Data System, I've helped to write about 200 papers, and surprisingly these have been cited in more than 12,000 other journal articles (hard to believe that many people actually read those papers!). Currently we are attempting to measure how the very large scale structures in the Universe grow from early times to the present by using Chandra observations to pick out distant quasars whose redshifts (distances) we measure from the ground. We also are using Chandra to observe how energetic outbursts from supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies produce shocks in the gas around them. Now what could be more fun than that?! In large part due to my experience in the Ross program, for each of the past 15 years I've been the PI of an NSF supported REU program that brings ten undergraduate students to the CfA for ten weeks of research. I've also worked to bring more science into elementary school classrooms. Although this has been primarily with local teachers, we developed an inquiry-based elementary science curriculum focused on seasonal change which can be found here. On the personal side, Bill and I enjoy being parents to three great kids. After our older daughter Julia was graduated from Harvard with a degree in Chemistry, she left to spend a year in Cambridge, England doing an M.Phil. Finding Cambridge and the Chemistry department warm and welcoming, Julia has stayed to do a PhD supported primarily by a Gates Fellowship. Her PhD will be presented on July 21 (same date as the Ross reunion!) Our son Daniel just graduated from Swarthmore College with a double major in physics and economics (and rugby!). He's about to start an internship in NYC at the Federal Reserve. Younger daughter Miranda is a high school junior who loves reading fantasy books, playing viola, and playing with our dog Millie. Have a great reunion. I'm sorry to miss it!
Richard Friedman
email: I attended the SSTP program in 1965. I think the most pronounced immediate effect of my participation was my intolerance for the lack of rigor in the algebra-trig-analytical geometry class I took the next year as a high school junior. I'm sure I was insufferable to the math department chair who taught the class, but she and I survived each other. When I went to Harvard in 1967, I planned to be a math major, but somehow my interest turned to politics in that intensely political year 1967-68, and I became a government major. I became a lawyer (and still practice in the General Counsel's Office of the U.S. Department of HHS). I can't say I've used my math much since then, except that I retained enough to help my kids through high school math. However, the intellectual excitement of that summer, and the introduction to rigorous thinking have certainly helped in my vocation of law, in my avocation of Talmud study, and in all areas of my life. I'd like to hear from fellow students in that summer of 1965. (In the class photo, I'm in a plaid shirt, four persons to the right of Dr. Ross.)
Charles Blair
email: I attended SSTP program run by Arnold Ross at Ohio State in 1966 and 1967. Some comments were submitted for a previous reunion. I have not published anything new in quite a while. However, I occasionally play around with proofs of well-known results. A recent example dealt with altitudes of a triangle WITHOUT constructing any extra lines, but using similar triangles.
Larry Stout
email: I won't be able to make it to the reunion -- my son is getting married on July 21 and I need to be there instead. I was a student in the Ross program in the summers of 1965 and 66 and was a counselor in 1967, 8, 9. The program solidified my decision to become a mathematician and gave me a (so far lifelong) interest in oddball variants of logic.
I majored in mathematics at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1970. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1974 writing a dissertation, General Topology in an Elementary Topos, under John Gray. I had a two year postdoc at McGill (then the center of work on topos theory) where I met and married my wife, Susan Burt. The next year I had a visiting position at Vassar. I've been at Illinois Wesleyan University since 1977, where I am now professor of mathematics. Susan has tenure at Illinois State as a linguist in the English department, so we've achieved academic nirvana -- two tenured jobs in the same town. My research is in category-theoretic approaches to non-classical logic, particularly fuzzy logic. Only rarely do I get to teach areas even close to my research, but my teaching has spanned the whole undergraduate mathematics curriculum (including many courses I never took). The SSTP program got me trying to thinking deeply about simple (and complicated) things, encouraged me to ask students to "prove or disprove and salvage if possible", and taught me to work "toward the abstract". Anybody remember the Saturday morning expedition to a nearby construction site to find the concrete? My two sons are now grown so I no longer have to summon up the interest to coach soccer, nor do I have a punk rock band in my basement anymore. In my spare time I enjoy English and Scottish country dance and play fiddle, viola d'amore, and English concertina.
Steve Rosenberg
email: I'm a math professor at Boston University, where I've taught since 1985. My research is in differential geometry with an emphasis on mathematical physics. I have a graduate text "The Laplacian on a Riemannian Manifold," which an anonymous reviewer (my wife) on Amazon called "a real page turner." My decision to become a mathematician dates from my first summer in the Ross Program in 1966, so my gratitude to Arnold Ross is too huge to easily express. I teach every summer in BU's PROMYS program, our SSTP counterpart, and it's deeply gratifying to see the next generation of mathematicians and scientists as excited about doing math as we were forty years ago.
Daniel Shapiro
email: As a first-year student in Dr. Ross's 1966 SSTP program I was intrigued by the mathematics, and by the Ross teaching style where each "PODASIP" can be salvaged and generalized in several ways. After getting a Ph.D. at Berkeley I came to Ohio State in 1974 as one of the last people hired while Arnold Ross was chair. In 1985 I ran a short course in the summer program, and then began teaching a problem seminar or counselor course every year, eventually assisting Gloria Woods and Arnold Ross with Program administration as well. When Arnold had a stroke in 2000 I took over the Program, making a few changes in the problem sets but trying to keep the essential spirit unchanged. I hope the next generations of Ross kids continue to think deeply about all sorts of simple things.
Barbara Molony
email: I was in the Ross program for two summers--1966 and 1967--and although I started college as a math major, I switched to history. I'm now a professor of history at Santa Clara University, but the Ross program meant a great deal to me as a scholar, even in a different field. I won't be able to attend the reunion, but I'm glad you're holding a commemoration of Dr. Ross's program!
Lang Withers
email: I got to participate in the SSTP at Ohio State University in the summer of 1967, just before my senior year in high school. This program helped to show me, even as an undisciplined teenager, how interesting and fun mathematics can be (contrary to the standard opinion in high schools everywhere). It gave me valuable formative training in mathematical reasoning, which has stayed with me throughout my college education and three decades in the defense industry.Since getting a BS and MA in mathematics from Caltech and Univ. of Colorado (1975), I've served the US Gov't in northern Virginia for 32 years, mainly focusing on signal processing algorithms and software. I joined the MITRE Signal Processing Center in 2004. Previously, I worked as a principal engineer for Raytheon/Falls Church, and at the Naval Research Lab. Having three wonderful daughters who have grown up, I've enrolled in a Physics PhD program at George Mason Univ, concentrating on quantum theory and applications. My hope is to use this degree later to teach and do research.
John Reiser
email: I plan to attend July 20, 21, 22. It will be the 40th anniversary of my first year as a student (1967) in what was then called the Summer Science Training Program ("SSTP") sponsored by the National Science Foundation. What a summer it was! Exhilarating hard work, perhaps the first time I experienced "peak", "in the zone", "coherent" thinking for an extended period. It was so good that I came back for two more summers as a student and two more summers as a counselor. Blackburn Hall dormitory, "1230 the new WCOL" radio station, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a TWA Boeing 707 landing at tiny Don Scott Field (OSU private airport) instead of Port Columbus International Airport, and many more memories; including first-year roommates David Fried, Gerry Myerson, Robert Tax. See you in July!
Lisa Salkovitz Kohn
email: In 1996, I wrote in detail about the value of the SSTP program to me and its impact on my life, both personal and professional, and what I said then continues to hold true. The grounding in mathematical thinking, and Dr. Ross' legacy of impassioned curiosity and aggressive problem-solving, have served me well as my career has flourished and allowed me to mentor and teach labor and employment law, arbitration, mediation, and legal representation skills outside the standard academic setting. I hope to get to the reunion to see old friends (so the rest of you had better come too, Margy and Janet!) -- and maybe my kids will be willing to come along to meet all the legends who have peopled their parents' and uncle's reminiscences. Best wishes to you all!
Stewart Shapiro
email: I will attend the reunion, and am very much looking forward to it.I am currently a Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State, specializing in logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of language. I also spend seven weeks each year at the Arche Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The Ross Program got me started on my lifelong passion. There I learned about rigorous proof, and the way to do mathematics in a cooperative way. I also met some wonderful teachers, Dr. Ross being foremost among them.I was re-acquainted with Dr. Ross some years ago, at a social event. It happened to be in the summer, and he invited me to have lunch with him, after a number theory lecture in the program. I attended the lecture, and then lost about a day and a half playing with the ideas presented there. It was terrific.
Debbie Epstein Rahav
email: In 1969, the summer after I attended Dr. Ross's program at OSU, I attended an astronomy program in Ojai which is funded by its alumni.
David Sze
email: As to where I am now - I'm mostly retired, remarried and moved to Quebec City Canada, learning French, and teaching some online.
Myron B. Allen
email: I attended the Professor Ross's SSTP in the summer of 1971, before entering my senior year in high school. I met many incredibly talented people, including my counselors and my roommates. I also decided that I REALLY wanted to become a mathematician. And so I did. After finishing graduate school, I joined the Mathematics faculty at the University of Wyoming, where I've spent my entire career since 1983. It's only fair to admit that I've gotten involved in a few other activities since then, some of them -- such as university administration -- arguably less reputable than the discipline of Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. Nevertheless, I still teach mathematics courses and participate to the extent that I can in the discipline. And I'll admit to fantasizing, occasionally, about a major coup d'etat that strips me of my administrative duties and returns me, full time, to the subject I have loved ever since those challenging, life-changing weeks I spent in Professor Ross's visionary program.
Martin L. Brock
email: I was at the Ross Program as a student in 1971 and 1972 and as a counselor in 1973. And believe it or not, I still have all my problem sets, solutions, class notes, and my own personal math notes/notebooks from those summers. I am eager to hear from classmates at the Program. I can't say enough, or begin to thank enough, for the program, the people, and what it has done to, and for, me.
Steven Weissburg
email: Since the program, I earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and then a law degree from the University of Michigan (Go wolverines) at Ann Arbor. I have worked at various large law firms in Boston, and am now a patent attorney, working on my own. One of my primary clients is MIT. The OSU math camp remains one of the most interesting and challenging times of my life. In many ways, the intellectual challenges exceeded even what faced me at MIT, except for some of the most difficult courses. I find that, among mathematicians, I earn their respect when they find that I attended the program. I keep in touch with Ken Argentieri, with whom I went to high school (just saw him at our 30th reunion) and David Jerison, who is on the faculty at MIT, near to my office. I have also befriended mathematicians Dan Stroock, of MIT, and Fernando Villeges-Rodrigues, of UT in Austin. Interesting, that after all these years of professional development and social climbing, I still prefer, socially, mathematicians to engineers, and engineers to lawyers.
Philip Shapiro
email: I am a Ross Program Alumnus from 1973 and 1974, now retired and living out here in Thailand (after finishing my career as an analog circuit designer). I spend quite a bit of time trying to teach myself mathematics. I am learning about Differential Manifolds, but recently decided to try to strengthen my foundations or at least try to satisfy my curiosity about some foundational topics. Studying alone allows me to avoid getting my sensitive ego destroyed, but it is inefficient. Progress is slow, but sustainable. Incidentally, I also heard from Marty Weinstock who is a professor of dermatology at Brown (and my roommate from 1973), and also from Al Borchers (who was a fellow magician, but with much greater talent, skills, and ability).
Ron Newman
email: I went into computers. Unfortunately, like many people in my field, I'm currently unemployed and looking for a new job after my previous employer went bankrupt.
Robert Indik
email: I am still at the University of Arizona math department, now as an associate professor. Most recently, I have been involved in research into nanophotonics. I frequently think about what I learned from the program, not only mathematically, but also about how mathematics is learned and taught, and I annoy my students by urging them to "think deeply about simple things".
Seth Alford: I attended SSTP at the University of Chicago in 1975. I went on to get a degree in CS from MIT in 1980. I've been working as a software engineer for the last 27 years. I also married a math major. Sometimes we argue about the Well Ordering Principle, which I first learned about at SSTP. She's a strict constructionist.
Lynne Butler
email
website: www.haverford.edu/math/lbutler.html: I didn't just fall in love with math in the summer of 1976, I also fell in love with The University of Chicago (where the Ross Program took place that summer). I majored in math at U of C, earned a PhD in math at MIT, then spent my postdoctoral years at Princeton and the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications. I teach math at Haverford College, where the students love learning as much as I love teaching. I've also had some very rich consulting experiences: for the speech recognition group at IBM (when I was a grad student), for the IDA Center for Communications Research (when I was an assistant professor in math at Princeton), and for the Educational Testing Service (when I was an associate professor at Haverford). I even spent a year as Haverford's Associate Provost! I think often of Professor Ross and my counselor Bindu Bambah. They have my deepest gratitude for helping me explore my mathematical interests and develop my mathematical talent.
Theodore J. Allen
email
website: people.hws.edu/tjallen: I was at the Ross Program in 1978 in Chicago. I remember the program being very intense, all the more so because I attempted to learn a lot of physics at the same time. The U of C bookstore was a magical place for me -- there were many interesting (and quite inexpensive) technical books for sale. There wasn't enough time for both number theory and physics! The problem sets, if done completely, would have eaten all the time available, and more. I still have memories of my counselor, Peter Dordal, saying to me nearly every day "Hen-sel's Lem-ma, Hen-sel's Lem-ma!" trying to get me to prove it for myself. I remember students Al Shapere, Ivo Klemes, Danny Grubb, David Atwood, Danny Goldstein, Rosabel Garcia, Richard Garfinkle, Maxim Dynin, Jonathan Miller, Jon Urdan, Dana Johnson, David Gove, John Rucell, my roommate William ("Yam") Dean, and others whose names I've forgotten. I also recall counselors Mike Griffin, Eric Sobel, Matthew (aka "Norbert") Wiener, and Jonathan Roberts. Many interesting things, both intellectual and otherwise, happened that summer. The fall after the program, in 1978, I entered the University of Wisconsin as a major in Applied Math, Engineering and Physics. I graduated from the UW in 1982 and went to Caltech to study physics for my Ph.D. At Caltech, I ran into Ivo Klemes, who was studying mathematics for his Ph.D. and is now a math professor at McGill University. It wasn't until I got to graduate school that I felt as challenged as I had at Arnold Ross's program.After I graduated from Caltech, I was a post-doc at Syracuse University. While there, I ran into Al Shapere, who had become a theoretical particle physicist as well and was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Al is now a physics professor at the University of Kentucky. After leaving Syracuse, I went to the University of Wisconsin as a post-doc and then assistant scientist in theoretical particle physics. During this time I ran into David Atwood, who was at post-doc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, I believe. David is now a professor of physics at Iowa State. I ran across Danny Grubb's name while browsing the web a while ago. He's now a math professor at Northern Illinois University. Danny Grubb also spent a lot of time reading physics in Chicago in 1978. I'm just amazed by how many of my fellow students are still in physics or mathematics.Now (2006) I'm an associate professor of physics at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, a small pair of coordinate men's and women's liberal arts colleges in Geneva, New York, in the beautiful finger lakes region. My teaching has been strongly influenced not only by Prof. Ross, but also by the other instructors, especially Paul Sally, whose informal and friendly style was very encouraging. I've always remembered his technique of sometimes tossing out silver dollars to students who correctly answered his (non-trivial!) questions in class. I've wanted to try that myself, but haven't yet done so. The first day of class Prof. Sally came in dressed as a coach. I'd like to try that as well!My research has been influenced by Prof. Ross's course mostly by the habits that the course cultivated, especially in thinking about simple examples, or as he put it in the daily problem sets: "food for thought." Prof. Ross's style was in a way similar to that of Richard Feynman, an inspiring professor of mine in graduate school who also taught his students to "think deeply about simple things."
Sol Lederman
email: I participated in the Ross program in 1979 and came back in 1980 as a junior counselor. I was attending the Bronx High School of Science at the time and a Math teacher, Mark Saul, encouraged me to apply for the program.After graduating from Bronx Science I went to Stanford where I studied Math and Sociology. I found myself in high tech, programming, doing tech support, and a variety of technical things for a number of companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Sun Microsystems.I now live in Santa Fe, NM where I work for my brother, still doing techie work and wearing a number of hats at his company, Deep Web Technologies www.deepwebtech.com.I would love to hear from graduates of the 1979-80 program.
Rena Zieve
email: I was at the Ross Program in 1981-85, in the first group of kids directed there from the Johns Hopkins Talent Search. Learning about the Ross Program was far and away the best benefit of the Talent Search. It was incredible to be around people my age who were willing and able to spend time thinking about real mathematics. By mid-college I knew I wanted to do experimental science research over the summer, but I still had to wrench myself away from Ohio State. I got a bachelor's in Chemistry and Physics (Harvard) and a PhD in Physics (Berkeley). I'm now at UC Davis, where I've just been promoted to full professor. Although my field is low-temperature experiment, material from almost every math class I've ever taken has come in handy for my research, so I always encourage physics undergrads to try math courses beyond the "useful" ones on differential equations. For the past three summers I've run an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates program in the Davis physics department. It's just 10-12 college students, each assigned to a different research group, but there are enough administrative headaches that I appreciate better the dedication Dr. Ross (and now Dr. Shapiro) had in keeping the program going year after year. My husband, Greg Kuperberg, is a math professor at Davis. We have two kids, who may soon be spending summers in Ohio themselves.
David Blackston
email: I attended the Ross Program from 1982 through 1987. When I entered the program I was just entering high school, and by the time I left I had been at MIT for 2 years. I majored in Math (with Computer Science emphasis) while an undergrad and graduated at the top of the department in 1989. Though Dr. Ross would frown on this, I also enjoyed participating in the Putnam and was on the MIT team for three years.After I finished at MIT, I went west to UCBerkeley to pursue a PhD in Computer Science. While in grad school I came to the conclusion that a life of research was not necessarily the life for which I was best suited, so when I graduated I went into industry. I am currently working for WaveMarket helping to develop location based service applications for cell phones. It's admittedly not particularly deep, but I really enjoy the work and the variety of problems I encounter keeps things very interesting.In other fronts, I am pleased to announce that I am now married to a wonderful woman, Jill, who I've known for years. We were best friends for a long time, and when we decided to try dating it just worked for us. We are the proud parents of a wonderful little boy, Zachary, who is still quite young but seems to like numbers a lot! Perhaps in 2020 or so he'll want to learn some number theory.It is hard to measure the effect the Ross Program has had on my life. I was quite young when I entered the program and it was the first time I had ever been surrounded by peers as interested and as good (or better) than me at mathematics. It was a difficult learning experience for me, but it cemented a life long love of mathematics within me. I still get a sense of great joy whenever I am speaking with a person interested in math and I can whip out the proof that every prime congruent to 1 mod 4 is the sum of two squares using Minkowski's theorem on lattices! I am forever changed by having gone through the program, and I owe Dr. Ross a debt that cannot be repaid. I am grateful that the program continues to thrive and that so many eager, fresh faces will be taught the importance of thinking deeply of simple things.
Glen Whitney
email: A fairly straightforward beginning: three summers in the Ross Program in the mid-eighties, math undergrad, linguistics master's degree, math Ph.D., three-year postdoc. Then, to find an elegant personal solution to the classic two-body problem (my wife, Nancy, is a chemistry professor), I "sold out and joined a technical trading firm" in the words of my boss there. Now, a decade later, I've switched to working part time at that trading firm, and looking for ways to use whatever skills I may have to make the world a better place. One way I've found is doing information technology work for a private foundation supporting basic research on the causes of autism, and I hope to find more. I've been fortunate to renew my interaction with the Ross Program in recent years, with several visits and talks on the mathematics of finance. The Ross Program has had a deep and abiding impact on my life: it opened my eyes to the idea that someone might actually want to study or do math as a full-time occupation, it connected me with lasting friends, it's helped me to look for and find simple solutions to apparently complex technical problems, and, perhaps most importantly, it increased my score on the Geek Test ("Have you ever attended a summer camp devoted to a scientific or technical subject?" Ka-ching!) I look forward to seeing many of you at the reunion.
Rocky Lee
email
Steve Riedl
email: I've thought a lot over the years about the impact my summer in the Ross math program had on me (my life, my career, etc). I should start by saying that it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I went to a pretty solid college prep high school and math had always come easily to me, but I was exposed not only to a whole new level of learning but also a whole new level of mathematical talent. I was truly blown away by the level of math skills of some of these kids from the New York Math Teams, etc. So at some level I felt like I was completely over my head for most of the summer.But somehow some of the information must have stuck. A quick example: I took the SATs in the spring of my junior year in high school, and scored a pretty respectable 1310 (710M, 600V). However, the reactions of my friends in the Ross program -- I received my scores over the summer -- were along the lines of, "That's too bad, but you know you can take them again." Clearly, respectable wasn't good enough for these kids so take them again I did, in the fall of my senior year. Three things changed between the first and the second time I took the test: first, I was 6 months older; second, my expectations for success were much higher; third, I had spent a summer in the Ross program learning how to think. My SAT scores reflected these differences: I scored a 1480. My 170 point improvement was well outside the range of what the test people would consider a normal variation in results. My SAT scores led to my getting accepted at Notre Dame. My Notre Dame education led to me receiving 3 actuarial summer internships while I was in college. My internships led to my being hired as an actuarial student at Aetna -- one of 5 job offers I received from the 7 companies I interviewed with. I eventually became a full-fledged actuary, and last year made Principal -- basically partner, at one of the premier actuarial consulting firms in the country. One never really knows the impact of one's individual decisions, and only through the lens of time and distance can you begin to appreciate the ripple effect of key events in your life. However, I truly believe that my summer studying in the Ross program had as significant an impact on my life and career as any other single event in my life. Keep up the good work!
Joshua Zucker
email: I'm a teacher (mostly of math, but also astronomy, computer programming) at Castilleja school in Palo Alto, CA. I'm still using my inspiration from the Ross summers to pass along beautiful math to a new generation of students, and to encourage them to think deeply of simple things. I do this inside the classroom, and also through extracurricular math: I was on the executive board of the ARML contest, I am currently a question writer for MATHCOUNTS, and I have been active in the Math Circles movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently, I helped create the Teachers Circle to pass along the message about teaching problem solving to middle school teachers throughout the country.I'm the father of approximately 2.5 kids (the .5 being one expected to be born in May 2007, which is what makes it so unlikely for me to be traveling in July).
P.J. Karafiol
email: I attended the summer of 1985, and am now teaching math at Walter Payton College Prep High School in Chicago. I am one of the coaches of Chicago's ARML team, and write problems for the AMC, AIME, and ARML contests.
Michael Mitzenmacher
email: My time at Ohio State helped shape my mathematical future. I majored in Math and Computer Science at Harvard, studied Maths (Part III) in Cambridge, and obtained my Ph.D. in theoretical computer science at Berkeley. After about two years getting some experience in a research lab (an experience I highly recommend!), I returned to Harvard as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 1999, and received tenure in 2005. While I do a mix of theoretical work and more systems-y project, mathematical modelling, methods, and formalism are the foundations of my work. The Ross Program -- and the lessons of thinking deeply of simple things -- has had a profound influence. You can find out more about me and my work by Googling for my home page.
Keith Conrad
email: I am currently in the math department at the Univ. of Connecticut. The undergrad number theory course here hadn't been offered in many years before I arrived, but they let me start teaching the course and it's very popular. This is in no small measure an effect of the Ross Program, which influenced the way I present the material in lecture and on the problem sets. So you can imagine that the students consider the course completely unlike anything else they have taken. (I may also sometimes repeat sayings or mannerisms of Dr. Ross in class, but the students don't recognize this.)
Brian Conrad
email: Hi! Since earning my PhD back in 1996, I've been an academic mathematician. My interests remain somewhere between number theory and geometry, a mixture that has attracted me ever since I saw the geometric proof of the 4-square theorem in my first year at the Ross Program. After several years as a postdoc I moved out to the midwest, where I've been (at the University of Michigan) ever since. The 4 (or 5?) summers that I spent at the Ross Program were extraordinarily influential in my life since that time. Not only did I get to meet a lot of people who remain good friends to this day, but it gave me the confidence to pursue mathematics as a career and to devote serious efforts to helping other young students to experience the joys of mathematical discovery. For example, ever since I was in graduate school I've advised high school students in research projects, all of which earned Finalist status in the Intel competition (perhaps sometimes with a little too much help from me, but advising PhD's isn't necessarily so different!), and 3 of those went on to top graduate schools in math. The experience of being a counselor at the Ross Program also very much influenced my own approach to being a PhD advisor and teacher. I'm sorry that I can't be at the Ross Reunion, due to being out of the country (at a math conference) at that time.
Don Marolf
email: After 7 years at Syracuse university (where I learned to XC ski and snowshoe), I moved in 2003 to the University of California, Santa Babrara. I'm a physics professor, specializing in (quantum) gravitational theory. Check my web page via Google for more details. What my official web page doesn't say is that I got married a year ago to Crystal Martin, an astronomer who studies galaxy evolution."Think deeply of simple things" is still my favorite phrase. I occaisionally use it on my students, though I don't think it resonates with them in the way I would like. I think they need more PODASIPs in their diet! The Ross program was my eye-opener to exploring math/science territory on my own, and to what a true joy such research can be. I doubt that I could repeat any of our classic proofs off the top of my head anymore, but those old problem sets still have a place of honor on the bookshelf!
Blake Mellor
email: I was at the Ross Program in 1987 and 1988. Since then, I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1999 (working in topology with Robion Kirby), and I am now teaching at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I'm very happy here, and since I got both tenured and married in the last year, it looks like I'll be staying.While my research these days is far removed from number theory, I still remember the Ross program as my first introduction to real mathematics and proofs, and it influences me every time I teach an introduction to proofs course. It showed me how cool mathematics really was, and was a large influence in my choice to pursue mathematics as a career.
Particia Hersh
email: I'm now an assistant professor in math at Indiana University in Bloomington, and my research area is combinatorics, more specifically algebraic and topological combinatorics. Attending the Ross program was really key in helping me see what pure math is and realize that being a math professor was the right career for me. And it's great to have made so many friends at the program who I keep bumping into at math conferences, at the schools I attended, etc.
Karan Singh
email: I am now an Associate Prof. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where I have been since 2002. Working backwards, I was with a startup in California, in New Zealand teaching and consulting for the Lord of the Rings film, and before that in Toronto at a software company called Alias where I helped produce Maya, a piece of software that is used today for animation.Before that were my formative years in Columbus '89-'95, where I was a student, counselor, grader and instructor at the Ross program while I also got my PhD in Computer Science.Around the time I graduated in 1995 I had no intentions of being an academic, but years spent in industry building software brought me round circle and the desire to have a longer term focus in my work and the love of teaching drove me back to academia. So I was recruited here at U of T in 2002 as an Associate Professor with credit for my work in industrial research.Today I work in Computer Graphics and Animation but use lessons learnt in number theory, combinatorics, graph theory and differential geometry everyday in my work. I am still actively working on the fringes of Mathematics and lead a project on discrete surface representations for industrial design and have organized a couple of mathematics of animation workshops for the Fields Institute here. I recently finished work on a 13 minute animated short film called Ryan that has been doing well at film festivals since it premiered at Cannes. I have also gotten quite obsessed recently by mazes and am looking at the ways to quantify the difficulty of solving a maze given its representation as a planar graph other than their visual appeal.Anyway, you can find this all and more on my webpage - www.dgp.toronto.edu/~karan
Megumi Harada
email: Since obtaining her PhD from UC Berkeley under the direction of Allen Knutson, Megumi has been happily living North of the Border. She spent 3 years as a postdoc at the University of Toronto and is now an assistant professor at McMaster University, which is a short train ride away from Toronto. These days, she mainly thinks about symplectic and hyperkahler quotients and equivariant cohomology theories.
Craig Helfgott
email: After getting a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at U.C. Berkeley, I spent two years in a postdoc position at Tel-Aviv University. Since then, I have joined the D.E. Shaw group as a quantitative financial analyst. Number theory remains one of my abiding interests. Over the course of my academic career, I have attended maybe eight or nine distinct summer research programs. The Ross Young Scholars Program rises head and shoulders above the others, both in terms of the learning experience in and of itself, and in terms of the social atmosphere. I have kept my bound copy of the Ross problem sets for the past 15 years, and I find myself pulling them out every few years just to review. I look forward to attending the reunion this year and hope to see a great many familiar faces.
Lauren Ancel Meyers
email: The Ross Program was among several experiences that led me to study math in college (Harvard). I now use mathematics in my work as a theoretical evolutionary biologist and epidemiologist.
Nelson Quim
email: University of Michigan Business School
MBA Program, Class of 2003
Robert Pollack
email: I attended the Ross program for many summers in the early '90s, and it would be hard to overstate how much influence those summers had on me. I am now in the math department at Boston University, still studying numbers, still conjecturing and still trying to salvage the false ones.I very much look forward to seeing many old friends at the reunion this summer.
Karen Edwards
email: I received my PhD in topology from UC Berkeley in 2001, and since Fall 2001 I have been teaching mathematics at Diablo Valley College, a community college in the Bay Area. OF COURSE my years in the Ross Program have influenced my teaching. In fact I often think about my algebra-level students ( i.e. high school algebra; we start at arithmetic and prealgebra at community colleges) and wish that instead of a semester of textbook algebra they could instead spend a summer studying number theory at the Ross Program. I haven't yet figured out how to revolutionize the teaching of prealgebra and algebra to more closely evoke the wonderful experience of discovering math I had at the Ross Program. But you can bet I think about it often. I've been married since 2003 and live in Berkeley with my husband Matt.
Andrew Lydon
email: I attended the Ross program during most summers from 1993-9. After graduating from Ohio State in math, I went to graduate school in political science. As interesting as I found the subject, I was disappointed in the main trends in academic political science. Rather than be perpetually swimming upstream, I decided that political science was better as a hobby than as a professional career path.Having been interested in computer science at various times, I got a job doing computer programming at a startup company. After that job ended, I used the money I had saved to take about a year of time to study various social science and history topics that I was interested in. This was followed by graduate school in computer science. I headed back to industry after writing a 231 page master's thesis. Currently, I'm on the technical staff at Sandia National Labs doing computer software R&D.
Lauren Williams
email: About my whereabouts, I'm now at Harvard, having finished my PhD in math recently (MIT '05). My focus in research is algebraic combinatorics (combinatorial questions motivated by representation theory, etc). The Ross program had a major impact on my formation as a mathematician -- it gave me a chance to experience the joys (and frustrations) of mathematical exploration.
Joe Subotnik
email: I would love, love, *love* to come to the reunion this summer. But I will not be able to make it, as I will have already started a postdoc in Israel. I am going to be an NSF international postdoctoral fellow working at Tel-Aviv University (with Prof. Abraham Nitzan) on charge-transport through quantum mechanical systems. I am just finishing up my Ph.D. now from UC Berkeley. Far away from number theory, but I swear I use the same principle over and over: don't stop thinking about something until it makes total sense. Golly were those summers at Ross so very useful for me. It amazes me that you still have the energy to keep going! Anyway, I do hope the reunion is a terrific success and I wish you all the best. And, furthermore, once I start making a postdoc salary, rather than a student salary, I will certainly make a donation!
Heather Sable (AKA The MathChick)
email: I attended the Ross Young Scholars Program in 1995, when Professor Ross himself was still lecturing. Since then, I attended Cooper Union and got a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. I went on to work in Technical Support for a while, followed by tutoring SAT math. In January 2003, I started a website, www.proudnerd.com, where I sell funny math t-shirts and other products with my own designs.I am now working as a Math teacher at a Middle School in NJ. I teach accelerated students in grades 6-8 Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, and Algebra II. I am also the Math Team Advisor for my school, which is very fun. I attended the Ross Program for Teachers for Number Theory in June and July of 2006, which was an amazing experience that I enjoyed thoroughly and from which I have learned a great deal.
Alexis Burgess
email: I'm getting married in Greece on May 26!
We're now in between places. I was teaching at NYU this spring, and living in Brooklyn. But we were just in Palo Alto looking for a house (and, surprisingly, finding one!), because I'm starting at Stanford in the fall, thankfully tenure-track, and in the philosophy department.
Chris Hanusa
email: Ross program of 1995, currently a post-doc in math at Binghamton University (SUNY), Binghamton, NY
Daniel O'Connor (from 10/2004)
email: I was a counselor 1998 and 1999.I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in math in 2001; I got a master's degree in applied math from UCLA in December 2003; since then, I've been on a leave of absence, doing things like studying physics, tutoring, and debating whether I should get a Ph.D or get a job...
Jared Weinstein
email: I was at the program '96 - '98 and have stayed in number theory ever since. I'm finishing up a PhD in Berkeley and am about to start a postdoc at UCLA. Who knows where I'd be without the Ross Program? The beauty of the material grabbed hold of me at the age of 14 and just never let go. I'm teaching summer session in July but I'm going to make it to the reunion by hook or by crook. See you there!
Jason Slemons
email: I can't go to the conference this year, I regret to say, but it's for a good reason; I'll be getting married instead! In my home town in Alaska. (That's right, there are people who came all the way from Alaska to do math in Ohio!) Since going to the Ross program for 3 summers, I have gone on to get a degree (or 2 or 3 and almost 4) in math. I am currently at the University of Washington in Applied Math doing Numerical Linear Algebra. I think the best part about the mathematics I learned at Ross was the enthusiasm I got while I was there for it. The sheer joy of doing mathematics has been a strong force in my life ever since going and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I also have valued the people I met there and always enjoy catching up when I see them. Of course I could thank Dr. Ross, and I do wish I could say more to him now. However, the person I can say thank you to, and who was my seminar instructor my first summer, is Dan Shapiro. Thank you for your work Dr. Shapiro, you are a great teacher. I'll never forget the sections I went to that first, hot, summer in Ohio, when I was 16.
Noah Snyder
email: I'd love to make it to the Reunion and will see whether I can squeeze it in. However, I'm not very confident that I'll be able to work it out as that month is really crowded.Berkeley is quite delightful. I'm currently in year 5, and will be graduating after year 6. I'm studying representation theory, quantum groups at roots of unity, and quantum topology with Nicolai Reshetikhin. I've had one paper published recently in the Journal of Algebra on structure of certain infinite dimensional Lie algebras, and have a paper coming up in Proc. AMS on representations of finite groups. Recreationally, I've also been doing a lot of puzzle writing (I wrote about a sixth of the 2006 mystery hunt) and solving.
Alex Wissner-Gross
email
website: www.alexwg.org: Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the 2007 reunion. I am current a Ph.D. Candidate in Physics at Harvard, doing research in Multiscale Programmable Matter. More info appears on my website.
Sonal Jain
email: I will be attending the reunion in Columbus. As far as what I've been up to, I'm finishing this year and next year I'll be at Courant doing a postdoc. I look forward to the reunion.
Oren Bassik
email: I was a student in 98 and a JC in 99 in the RYSP. Changed my life (I'm sure you've heard that a hundred times over though.)I graduated from U of Chicago in math and economics in 2004, and have been working in finance in NYC since, trading exotic interest rate options.
Jesse Kass
email: Since my time at the Ross Program, I have started graduate school in mathematics at Harvard University. I am working somewhere in the intersection of number theory and algebraic geometry and plan on graduating next year. The Ross Program, of course, had a huge impact on me. Not only did the program spark in me a deep love of mathematics, but those summers were a uniquely intense intellectual experience that profoundly impacted my thinking, both mathematical and otherwise.
Robert Moore
email: Hi, I'm in my second year of college now at Purdue in Computer Engineering and realized I should update my email with you all. Thanks, and thank you to Ross, who helped bring forth my love for mathematics and allowed me to decide to double major in math, which I will hopefully some day teach; and to the tough problem sets that allow me to actually write complete proofs in advanced classes and on the Putnam with ease.
Laura Gladstone
email: I just graduated ('07) from Columbia University, Columbia College, majoring in physics and concentrating in math. I was the president of the Columbia Society of Physics Students, and an officer for three years with the Columbia Bach Society. I worked extensively with the MiniBooNE experiment, a short-baseline neutrino oscillation search at Fermilab. This summer, I'm returning to my assistant photographer job with the Oregon Bach Festival and generally reconnecting with Oregon. In the fall, I'm starting physics grad work at University of Wisconsin, Madison, (with a NDSEG fellowship) where I'll continue working with an experimental neutrino group, most likely IceCube, the neutrino observatory in the ice at the south pole.
Jared Bass
email: My summer plans are still somewhat uncertain. If it is at all possible, I will try to come to the Reunion. In the two summers since I was at the Ross Program in 2004, I've been to the Director's Summer Program and the Duluth REU. Both were great research experiences, and I will actually be getting a publication out of Duluth - I have had an article accepted by the Journal of Number Theory. I will be graduating from Harvard a few months from now, and just found out that I will be going to Chicago for graduate school in math next year. I'm not at all sure of what area I'll be going into, but Chicago has a very strong, broad introductory program, which will hopefully help me to decide.
Chris Church
email: Since starting graduate school in Electrical Engineering at OSU, I've put together enough material for three conference papers (two published, one more in September). My masters thesis will likely be a combination of all those papers. The topic will be something along the lines of "Prediction of Code and Carrier Phase Biases in GNSS Receivers." My particular work deals with adaptive antenna arrays for use in precision (mostly military) GPS applications.
Richard Gottesman
email: I am very interested in attending the 50th reunion. I am currently finishing a master's in mathematics at Brown and am excited to continue my education at a math PhD program in the fall. I am still interested in doing research in number theory and "thinking deeply of simple things".I still keep in touch with many of the counselors from Ross. I hope the Ross Program is doing well.
YinFeng Shao
email: I'm finishing up my junior year at MIT, majoring in theoretical math and minoring in economics. This summer I'll be interning at a trading firm in Chicago.
Tim Abbott
email: I'm currently a senior at MIT, applying to graduate schools in (Theoretical) Computer Science. The Ross program taught me how to think, and no other experience compares with it in its influence on me.Key to the success of the program for me when I returned as a Counselor was its intensely thoughtful environment. Even at MIT, I have not found another environment with the same concentrated intellectual intensity as the Ross Program, where everyone believes in thinking deeply about simple things.
Joe Pacold
email: I'm now a junior majoring in physics and math at Indiana University, and am just beginning the grad school application process; I'm hoping to work towards a PhD in theoretical physics. The experience I had at the Ross Program has turned out to be incredibly valuable. I haven't studied much more number theory, but Ross was really where I learned how to construct and write a good proof.
Eve Drucker
email: I'm graduating from Harvard in June with a major in math and a minor in economics. After that, I'll be working in finance in NYC for a few years before possibly going back to school.
Matthew Tang
email: I attended Ross during the summer of 2004, and I am currently attending Princeton University pursuing an Electrical Engineering degree. I have to say, looking back, that I was pretty immature. But I've learned a lot, and Ross has given me an invaluable experience (besides problem solving skills) that I would not have found elsewhere. I hope that the program continues to flourish :) I have met a number of Ross program alumni at Princeton, and we all seem to have the same views concerning the program.
Michael Lee
email: I am currently a first year student at the University of Michigan: Ann Arbor and plan on double majoring in Computer Science and Computer Engineering as well as at least a Math minor. I am also considering the possibility of a music minor among other options. I really enjoyed my first semester and hope the next one will be even better. I am currently a part of the U of M solar car team in the operations division and am also working for university residential computing. I don't really have time for fun math right now; I still need to take care of my core requirements.I was in a research program last summer sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Central Michigan University. My research topic was on the linear algebra of magic squares (not really useful but lots of fun). I hope to continue research in either math or computer science in the future.
Alex Dubbs
email: I unfortunately cannot make it to the Reunion, since I will be here at Harvard (where I am currently a pure math major) working for an economist (Prof. Roland Fryer). Things are going very well, I am currently taking second-semester abstract algebra and quantum mechanics, and I am looking forward to a slew of geometry and topology classes next year. Hope everything at Ross is going well too.
Vivek Agarwala
email: After Ross in the summer after 9th grade (2005), I went on to attend the Stanford University Mathematics Camp last year (summer after 10th grade). I am now a junior at the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. My time at Ross had a profound impact on me both as an student and as a person. It was Ross that first sparked a deep interest and commitment to studying in the field of mathematics. The Ross program was truly a transformative experience and I cherish every lecture, problem set, and minute spent with my counselor over the summer. I have embraced the notion of thinking deeply of simple things and continue to remain extremely dedicated to and interested in the field of mathematics. I cannot thank you enough for providing me with such an excellent and shaping experience.
Matt Bunday
email: This school year I enrolled in EPGY's new Online High School. I am taking their AP physics B, AP US history, English, philosophy of government, and C programming. I'm still enrolled in UMTYMP and I just took the second test of this semester's linear algebra course. I've also been part of some extracurricular clubs that the teachers at OHS put together. I recently coded the website for our student newspaper, and this next issue I will be writing two articles, one of which will be about math. I would have considered Ross again this summer, but EPGY has a summer session for OHS that conflicts, where I will be doing physics labs in order to get AP credit for my physics course. I really enjoyed my experience at Ross, because it was so different from other summer programs. And it was a very good kind of different. Instead of being led by the hand through all the material and being force fed the concepts, at Ross we got to discover for ourselves. I regret that I didn't have that kind of experience earlier, because while I was at Ross I sort of didn't get it. I wasn't used to having to be self-motivated, so I let myself get behind in the sets. A little too late in the program I figured out that I really needed to apply myself to the sets, but I did manage to finish a QR track before the QR lecture. I think overall it was just a very liberating experience to be placed in such a different learning environment, and I hope I will have a chance to try it again, because I think that next time it will go a lot better. Another great thing was that I got to be really close with my camp mates, because of the duration and because of the relatively free schedule we kept. Thank you for putting together a great program.