MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Monday, 06-Jan-97 21:24:55 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 7637 Last-Modified: Friday, 23-Feb-96 09:22:11 GMT Personal - Mike Hewett

Mike Hewett - Up Close and Personal

Let's see, I'm kind of laid-back, but I also enjoy competition very much. I relax by reading or thinking. I'm not especially artistic, but I do play the piano and the guitar. Van Gogh's paintings and Frank Lloyd Wright's houses and rooms interest me, as do numerous musical artists. Someday I'd like to design my own house. Over the years, I have learned to appreciate good food.

Some of my personal heroes are Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Don Knuth. All have a tremendous intellect, impeccable personal and professional integrity, and a profound moral conscience. Over the years, several teachers had a positive influence on my life. I admire those who are good at teaching and guiding students.

Competition

As I said above, I enjoy competition. A couple of competitions I have entered have been the KME National Mathematics Competition and the ACM Scholastic Programming Contest.

KME (Kappa Mu Epsilon) is a national mathematics honor society, whose membership consists mainly of small universities. Every two years they have a national convention and hold a mathematical paper competition in conjunction with the competition. In 1979, while an undergraduate at Washburn University, I developed a mathematical methods for composing music. It used stochastic processes to generate musical tunes based on a composer's known style. The results were reasonably interesting and my paper was awarded First Place in the competition. I now know that stochastic methods for composing music were discovered in the 1600's, so the methods I thought I had invented were not new. Nevertheless, it was an interesting bit of research.

ACM holds an International Scholastic Programming Contest in conjunction with the Computer Science Conference (CSC) every Spring. In 1985, while a graduate student at Stanford, I formed a team that went on to win the Programming Competition that year. This was the first team that Stanford every fielded, and Stanford has since maintained a very high standard in the competition, winning it several more times since 1985. One unique thing about Stanford's teams is that they form and compete without any faculty assistance.

Reading

These are some of my favorite books:

Deep Thoughts by Mike Hewett

Vincent Van Gogh

Frank Lloyd Wright

Musical Artists

Food

Pictures

Some pictures for your enjoyment:

Allie

This is my daughter Allie -- click to enlarge (165K)

Allie at the dinosaur exhibit. Zilker Park, Austin, Texas, USA. May 1994 (260K)

Allie's first fish. West of Bryan, Texas, USA. May 1994 (75K)

Texas

They grow 'em big in Texas. Caldwell, Texas, USA. August 1993 (170K)

Every couple of months I organize another "Mike's Hike", where we go to some interesting part of Texas not too far from Austin and hike. In the process we usually have some misadventure. Here are some pictures from the previous hikes.

Mike's Hike #1: Enchanted Rock

Enchanted Rock is a granite dome about 90 miles west of Austin. You can walk to the top and see for miles. Once we made it to the top, Naren spotted what he thought was a good restaurant, while Jun used the binoculars to hunt for his car keys. No wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. That part came later. After exploring the top of the rock, we started working our way down, which was quite exciting.

Later that night we managed to lock Jun's keys in the trunk of his car, a Geo Prism, which proved absolutely impossible to break into. The AAA guy had never seen anything like it. We ended up staying at Enchanted Rock past sundown, watching the stars come out and eating pizza in the moonlight while Johannes' roommate brought us a spare key all the way from Austin. We'll have to make a trip for German food some other time, Johannes!

Mike's Hike #2: Pedernales Falls

This trip started out with a minor car accident before we even left the UT campus. Marty's beloved 1973 Mustang suffered a dented front left panel. Once we made it to the State Park, we had fun hiking even though the temperature reached 103 degrees. After hiking we rushed back to the Pedernales River and sat in the river, which was also very hot.

Mike's Hike #3: Barton Creek, er, Natural Bridge Caverns

It rained 8 inches in Austin the night before the hike, so when we met before the hike [L->R: Jun, Coquis, Marty, Johannes, Keiko, Mike, Sowmya, Bala, Stephen, Naren] we decided to do an "indoor hike" instead. We ended up at Natural Bridge Caverns near New Braunfels, which has some very nice stalactites and stalagmites. The highlight of the tour came when the tour guide asked us if we were a "Geology Club or something". Apparently the questions we asked had more content than your average cave tourist. After the hike the guide stayed behind with us and answered more of our questions.

Our usual car problem surfaced, this time in my car. It started hiccuping halfway to the cave and stopped running for a while. Eventually it started again and we made it without further problems. Just a little reminder from God.

After our cave tour we ate lunch/dinner at Krause's Cafe, a wonderful German restaurant in New Braunfels that makes their own desserts. Several people had cheesecake, while I had the "Magnificent 7" cake, featuring seven different kinds of chocolate. After dinner we staggered over to the outlet mall in San Marcos and visited about 10 of the 110 shops, ending with a coffee session at a nearby spot.

America

Mike and niece at Mt. Rainier. Southeast of Seattle, Washington, USA. June, 1993 (180K)

Detail at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. San Francisco, California, USA. October, 1988 (80K)

World

Coming soon!
Author: Micheal S. Hewett
Email: hewett@cs.utexas.edu
Last Updated: Monday, April 17, 1995