About me
- Browse my mathematical genealogy. My direct academic ancestors include a remarkable number of people I've heard of: Gauss, Euler, Leibnitz, Bernoulli, Fourier, Lagrange, Dirichlet, Poisson, Jacobi, Ohm, Klein, and more recently Tucker (advisor to Nash, Shapley and Gale) and AI pioneers Minsky, Pappert, Sussman and McDermott.
- My partner Judith Walker is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies at UBC.
- My sister Allison Leyton-Brown is a composer, pianist, and musical director living in Toronto.
- I have a cat: Mary. Pippin, rest in peace...
Fun links (from back before social media)
- A Mathematician's Lament: An excellent description of what the practice of mathematics is really like for working mathematicians, and a lament for how it's taught in the K-12 curriculum. For an example of math that kids could get excited about, see Vi Hart's YouTube channel, e.g., this video of hers.
- Structured Procrastination: Useful time-management insights for academics. Amazingly, it won the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature. In the end, I liked the name so much I named an algorithm after it; see my publications!
- An excellent article on the intellectual habits of critical thinkers.
- A Million Random Digits, published in hardcover by Rand in 1955. The page says "in this digital age, we thought it appropriate to reissue a new edition of the book in its original format, with a new foreword"--but, luckily, the very same random digits as before!
- A classic email forward: how to win arguments.
- Photos from my research group's whitewater rafting trip in June, 2009.