Personal Information

Some Quotes

"Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may."
Jon Stewart, William and Mary College Commencement Address, 2004
I was there when Mr. Stewart gave this speech -- my brother graduated from WM that year.
Full text of the speech, funny as usual.

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
Eleanor Roosevelt

"Do only what only you can do."
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, advice to a promising researcher who asked how to select a topic for research.
Memorial Resolution to E.W. Dijkstra, University of Texas at Austin.

Humor

Click here.

My Wife's Research

Shin-Yi Chou's homepage

My wife is an economist. Her research interest includes health economics and applied econometrics. She is an Associate professor at Lehigh University. She is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research has been mentioned on:

• Washington Post, September 12, 2005, The Wiz's Weighty Proposals (by Richard Morin).
• New York Times, July 24, 2005, Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women (by Daniel Gross).
• New York Times, March 3, 2003, ON THE CONTRARY; Belt-Loosening in the Work Force (by Daniel Akst).
• Orlando Sentinel, August 28, 2005, As smoking drops, does obesity rise?.
• Interviewed by CBS MarketWatch, March 9, 2003.

Academic Information

The following is my academic genealogy (see the Mathematics Genealogy Project):

1. Li-San Wang (University of Texas at Austin, 2003).
2. Tandy Jo Warnow (University of California at Berkeley, 1991)
3. Eugene Leighton Lawler (Harvard, 1963)
   Combinatorist at UC Berkeley until his death in 1994; wrote this famous book.
4. Anthony Gervin Oettinger (Harvard, 1954)
   Co-founder and Chairman of the Harvard Program on Information Resources Policy.
5. Howard Hathaway Aiken (Harvard, 1939)
   Pioneer on computer development; invented Mark I.
6. Emory Leon Chaffee (Harvard, 1911)
   Best known for his work on thermionic vacuum tubes; pioneered work on controlling weather, by dropping electrically charged grains of sand to break up clouds.
7. Harry Moss (?)

Here is a detailed tree of genealogy tracing back to Emory Chaffee.

My Erdös Number is at most 3:

1. Paul Erdös
2. László Székely
3. Tandy Warnow, Bernard M.E. Moret
4. Li-San Wang

Family and Friends

• Some pictures.
• Je-Luen Li
  Physicist at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. I've known him since high school.
• Shih-Schon Lin
  Another high-school classmate. A computer science postdoc at UPenn, he is a war history guru and has a license to pilot small airplanes.
• NTUGF
  A student society I attended while I was an undergraduate (Chinese Big5).
• NTUEE94
  Alumni of the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University who (most of them) graduated in 1994 (Chinese Big5).