self-introduction

[lrudolph]

Greetings.  I'm a colleague of Nick Thompson's, still
at Clark University, where I'm a Professor of Mathematics
in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.
Note that I am *not* a Professor, or professor, of
Computer Science (or computer science).  I have, however,
hung out with computer scientists of various sorts a lot
over the years; in graduate school (1969-1974) I spent a
lot of time (some remunerated monetarily) in the Logo Lab
at Project MAC, and in fact was a co-author of the first
(internally) published Logo manual and the first
(externally, in the American Journal of Physics) article
about Turtle Geometry.  Much, much more recently (in
the last 4 years at Clark) I have begun a fruitful
collaboration with a roboticist, and have attended
more robotics conferences than I could have imagined
5 years ago, in the process meeting a *lot* more
engineers and very smart very young professors (often
both in the same person) than I have for years and
years.  (As you may have learned from Nick, Clark
does not have an engineering school.)

In between those two periods I did mostly low-dimensional
topology (knots and braids and complex plane curves);
Nick having long ago introduced me to a psychological
colleague of ours (Jim Laird) who happens to live a
couple of miles from me, Jim and I car-pooled our way
to work for years, and our car-pool turned into a private
psychology seminar.  Eventually I got lured over to the
Dark Side with the suggestion that I should try to find a
mathematical model for emotion space.  The NSF paid for me
to spend a year in Nick and Jim's building, trying to do
so.  I very quickly decided that first I would have to
educate the psychologists about mathematics. So that's
what I've been working on for 5 or 6 years now.  

At first the robotics I was doing was pretty distant from
psychology (kinematics of linkages) but lately I've begun
some work that applies to both fields (using finite
topological spaces and stratified manifolds to model
the process of schematizing continuous data).  

My robotics colleague and I, together with a former
postdoc of Nick's, have proposed to NIH that we should
get a grant to use NetLogo programs and topology for
investigating autism-spectrum disorders.

This is already non-brief.  Yet more is available to
http://black.clarku.edu/~lrudolph.  

I will now go off to the list archives to find out
what you've been saying about Thurston's article.
(Thurston is, of course, pre-eminently a low-dimensional
topologist; but he has also worked on many other things,
including linkages.  *Not*, I think, on emotions;
although some people have probably assumed he was a bit
autistic from time to time, and I wouldn't blame them.
I know him, but he doesn't know me, I think.  In any
case, I definitely have a pre-existing perspective
on him and his thoughts on mathematics.)

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org