Born: September 16th, 1955
I was born in in Atlanta Georgia. At age 5, my family moved to LA. At 16, we moved from Palos Verdes to Orlando, FL, because my father was appointed Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows Incorporated (no lie), and he was to build Circus World, right next to Disney World and Bible World. (Does this begin to explain some things?)
I first failed to get my BA at UC Santa Cruz in 1977, after spending my first two years at Colgate and Skidmore Colleges. My major was "Science", and I never turned in my thesis, so: no degree.
I spent the next five years proving to my parents that I could get by without a college degree. Hey, it was the '70s, and I was in Santa Cruz... I lived in a garage we called the Psychedelic Dungeon; rent was $80 a month. It had 87 different colored lights, including the radio-controlled laser light show. Every surface except one third of one wall was covered in cloth, tapestries and rugs. Yes--I was a phony hippie. But the Psychedelic Dungeon was absolutlely acoustically dead, and I had the Stereo from Hell, so it was way cool, and only blocks from the beach.
Eventually this got boring, so I went back to school. Two years later, in 1984, I finally got a degree in CS, with a minor in math. I immediately entered grad school at UCSC and, three quarters later, took my first graphics class. Since then, I've never done anything else (except when they made me). At UCSC I had the pleasure of working with Kelly Booth, Alain Fournier, and Dietmar Saupe. Kelly taught me about frame buffers and The One True Path of the Ikonas; Alain taught me about modeling natural phenomena; and Dietmar recommended me to Mandelbrot for a programming job at Yale, which I landed.
That's when I'd hit the big time. Time to ditch the jeans & tee-shirts, grab a tweed coat, and it's off to squalid New Haven to work with The Great Man in the Yale Math Department. A few weeks later, Benoit was leaving for a trip of several days and I asked if I could make pictures while he was gone. He replied, in true form, "Render unto Caesar, Caesar's due!" and so I rendered. When he came back, he liked what I had done so much that he never made me do anything else, ever again. The nine-month appointment turned into a year, the one year into two; I was all ready to go back to Santa Cruz and complete my PhD. Then David Gelernter invited me to stay at Yale for my PhD. This seemed a zany idea to me, but they admitted me, so I stayed.
They finally booted me out of the nest in May of 1994, and I landed at George Washington University. I got married the week before graduation, to the lovely and not-to-be-trifled-with Beth Ladyko. We got two puppies, Jasmine and Jasper. When Beth and I split up, I took Jasmine and she took Jasper. Since then, Jasmine has been my constant companion and the center of my tiny universe.
GWU turned out to be a bust. So, in rapid succession, I went to work at Bethesda Softworks, Digital Domain, and MetaCreations. When Meta sacked the lot of us in December, 1999, I started Pandromeda to make real my research goal since I joined Mandelbrot at Yale: the creation of a window on the parallel universe that exists in fractal mathematics. This became MojoWorld, and will continue to be my life's work until further notice.
In 1999 I got back together with my sweetheart from back in '78, Sandy Peters. She brought in Dudely, AKA Spudley Do Wrong, to complete our pack of four.
Mostly I do computer graphics. I love computer graphics! I love things that fly, so I've been into paragliding, hang gliding, sky diving, model airplanes and model rockets. Pyrotechnics is my main hobby--I design and build my own rocket motors. I like to do various wacky things, including the neon suit and weird "religious" practices. I also love the outdoors; Sandy and I spend a lot of time exploring the Appalachians. Now I have my own planets, and I enjoy exploring those, too. ;-)
I love the physical sciences. I read Science News religiously.
I'm very serious about computer graphics as a new Process for the visual arts. I've got a whole thesis on that topic: Formal Logic & Self-Expression.
Mostly I love Nature, rockets and computer graphics.
(If you really want all the gory details of my professional life, see my curriculum vitae.)
