About me
Well, this is me, Haris Skiadas. Some of you might know me as Charilaos, but I try to avoid that since lots of people have problems pronouncing it. (It should probably be pronounced as Hari-la-os I guess.)
I am currently a graduate student in Mathematics at the University of Chicago, finishing my dissertation on the “Irregularity of the Gauss-Manin connection”. For the coming year I will be a visiting instructor at the Illinois Wesleyan University. In my years in Chicago I have developed a great interest in the teaching of Mathematics at the college level, and I am planning to focus my efforts on improving the level of math education that college students receive. I believe modern mathematics is a marvelous edifice, that is almost completely unknown to the general public, and I consider this to be very unfortunate. I feel it is our duty to expose our students to some of the beautiful parts of 20th century mathematics, to try to explain to them what it is we are doing and why we like it so much, instead of dismissing it as too advanced and complicated.
Computers have been an integral part of my life since I was 5 years old, when I father got me a ZX Spectrum. I learned programming before I even learned English, thanks to that computer. After many years of struggle with windows machines (and lots of hours of game-playing), I decided a year ago to move to the Mac, and I haven’t regretted it since. I’m a proud owner of an iBook G4, and I consider it to be an extension of my fingertips. I do most of my work on it, which involves a lot of LaTeXing, working on this blog and my webpage with Markdown, HTML, CSS and recently trying to learn PHP, and programming in Python and Obj-C. All this of course takes place in the canvas provided by my favorite text editor, TextMate.
I hope you enjoy your visit. Leave me a comment if you have any suggestions or just thoughts you would like to share.
Haris
