Andy Long bids you welcome!

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering. Arthur C. Clarke

Home Address: Anna, Tchapo, and I 1228 McIntyre Drive Ann Arbor, MI 48105 phone: (734) 764-0195 Work Addresses: BioMedware 516 N. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1236 phone: (734) 913-1098 fax: (734) 913-2201 Dept. of Epidemiology, U of M 109 Observatory St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2029 phone: (734) 615-2021 email: aelon@sph.umich.edu http:// www.sph.umich.edu/~aelon

"I'm sorry to say that the subject that I disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it."

Malcolm X, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
51st on one list of greatest non-fiction of the 20th century.
I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to talk to Malcolm X about mathematics!

• Where has mathematics been?
  • Math bios, and more Math Bios (with other scientific types thrown in).
  • Even More Math Bios, plus other web resources for the math historian.

• Where is mathematics going?
  • Towards a means of modelling uncertainty, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
  • Towards web-based courses? Try this on-line real analysis text.
  • Certainly towards on-line resources like this Finite Mathematics & Applied Calculus Resource Page (especially their on-line utilities, such as this function grapher).

• What does it take to become a mathematician?
  • A special brain?

• Students of particular areas:
  • Calculus and Multivariate Calculus Students: here are some xlisp-stat codes that you may want to try, which require my version of xlispstat (which I call Ripon Good Math). If you have any installation problems, let me know and I'll help you figure things out....
  • Numerical Analysis Students: look here for unix command help, some software from the book by Burden and Faires, maple scripts, and gnuplot help. Someday we might get MATLAB, the best matrix package around.
  • Complex Analysis Students: here are some MuPAD images which should look familiar. Real and imaginary parts of some common functions.

• Mathematical Tools:
  • For mathematical typesetting, I get by nicely with public domain packages, like LaTeX. If you're interested in public domain software from the GNU foundation, like emacs (the world's best text editor), try MIT.
  • Another tremendous public domain mathematics tool is Xlisp-stat, based on xlisp. It is not so user friendly, but is free and gets more and more delightful as you play with it. It is available for Macs, PCs, and UNIX. I'm getting more interested in LISP (Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses) all the time! (I lied: it's LISt Programming.)
  • GRASS is my GIS.
  • Jokes on statistics and statisticians (from http://baserv.uci.kun.nl/~johnh/stathum.html).
  • The Mathematical Atlas.

• Need a job? Something to eat? The words and guitar licks to that song you like?
• How about a laugh? Or put songs and laughs together with my hero Tom Lehrer! Before starting your own band, you should be aware that you can't use these names! If you're making buttons, you might try these...., while you can probably buy these bumper stickers.
• What good is money?
• Is someone you know taking the bible too seriously?
• Si vous etiez PCV au Togo: choses, and sample The Friends Of Togo Fufu Bar. Some of you may remember our friend and leader John Elmer. Try this translater if you've forgotten your French (or franglais). Marek and I had a little fun with it.
• Cline family: unite!
• Long family too!
• You've all heard me talk about William Sloane Coffin: now you can see what he looks like! Coffin (and I) both believe that "...the acquisition of knowledge is second to its use."
• And speaking of heros, here's the obit of a man who's saved my life a dozen times without so much as a word of thanks: Sidney Allen Heenan.
• Another fellow to check out is Jonathan Kozol, if you want to cry "tears of pathos, compassion, and yes, shame" for the "Other America".
• New Heros:
  • Ruby Bridges
  • James Hansen
• The Other America is Noam Chomsky's meat, of course.

My dad and I made some movies over the summer which I really like. Have a look at his home page for them (and some other images representing our cooperative research). Those movies are not as big and slow as the others which follow below (but they're still big and slow!). Here's my dad's latest creation (created using a new technique of ours), which he's carving in wood.

As a graduate student I made an mpeg movie using the UNIX shell script make_movie. It shows how the weights in an interpolation scheme change as a function of the smoothness of the data (for those "in the know", as the nugget varies).

Here's another one, showing how neighbor weight is a function of the position at which one is interpolating, for a spherical model. Here's the same thing, only for the gaussian model. They're very similar.

Finally, I have one showing Abe Lincoln being unceremoniously decomposed, then recomposed, via the Singular Value Decomposition.

• Mapping Groundwater Pollution (a poster session that I gave in Breckenridge, Colorado)
• Modern Map-Making (an informal introduction to geostatistical techniques in my graduate student showcase exhibit)
• Simple Skins for Matrices (and Other Meshes) Surface Fitting via Matrix SVD (for the 1999 Ohio Sectional Meeting of the MAA.
• Rabies in Connecticut (for the GEOMED '99 Conference, Paris).
• Curvemesh Interpolation (presentation at the 2000 Miami (OH) Meetings)

• freely available spatial statistics software (created using my latex2web software).
• dissertation: Cokriging, Kernels, and the SVD: Toward Better Geostatistical Analysis

• I can help you with: getting started with UNIX, UNIX shell scripts, XWindow stuff, Graphics, public domain software, emacs, Maple, LISP, C++, IDL, Xt (XWindow toolkit), LaTeX, info, perl. As a Linux user, I always need some help with UNIX System Administration.
• I'm interested in: computer graphics, LISP, statistical packages, 3-d graphics, LaTeX, emacs, symbolic manipulators (like Maple and MuPad), public domain software.
• I'm not too interested in: Most DOS/Windows stuff; big commercial software; and especially not interested in tv!

• my chronology in logos.
• geostatistics guru Donald E. Myers's home page, and his list of publications.
• my cv, and my dissertation (gzipped postscript).
• I wrote a paper (or two) with U of AZ Ecology and Evolutionary Biology prof Rick Michod, concerning the Origin of Sex (gzipped postscript).