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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.
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.
Some pictures for your enjoyment:
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)
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.
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!
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.
Detail at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. San Francisco, California, USA. October, 1988 (80K)