Experience

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  Board of the Montana League of Women Voters

  • State of Montana

  • Board Member

    • Apr 2016 - Present
    • State of Montana

    I served as communications director of the Billings League of Women Voters, when the present president, Betty Whiting, saw an opportunity to use me better at the State Level for some particular skills: 1. Fundraising and communication skills to put together symposia. 2. Enthusiasm to generate a presence for the League with a speaking circuit presence throughout the state under the rubric of "Revitalizing Democracy" (a name created by Nancy Leifer). This would use some of the same ideas that worked to create the "Rise to Rockies" symposium for the Yellowstone Art Museum. In addition, I would take the rule of Commuications' Director producing the Montana League's quarterly "Voter," a task I performed for the Billings League.

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  Rocky Mountain College Board

  • Billings MT

  • Board member serving on the Education, Advancement and Trustee Tenure Committees

    • Jun 2014 - Present
    • Billings MT

    Rocky has the task of adjusting its faculty appropriately to fill positions and fund raise for a future with enhanced science offerings and a new Science Building. The millions needed for the new Science Building require thinking how to approach donors who aren't oriented toward Rocky football, where even large donations are easier to get. Nevertheless it was a positive sign that a 9 year attempt to build a new Rocky football field and stadium books was fulfilled in April 2016. The vision for new faculty positions and finding ways to upgrade the faculties prestige -- if accomplished -- will be a serious change in the atmosphere at Rocky.

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  Yellowstone County Democrats Central Committee

  • Billings Montana

  • Director of Communications

    • Jan 2014 - Present
    • Billings Montana

    I handle maintaining the database and messaging for the Yellowstone County Democrats' database. This includes messaging on the following tasks: 1. Each weeks' Wednesday morning Seminar on topics pertinent to understanding changes in organizations and projects in Yellowstone County. 2. In coordination with Tom Towe, Seminar Head, finding speakers to fill the Wednesday breakfast slot. 3. The Central Committee monthly dinner, which brings the politicians at the top of the Democrats' in Montana to Billings. 4. To coordinate upgrades in the YC web site, calendar and the presence of Orange Count politicians to the whole state. 5. Fund raising efforts by local politicians and advertising State politicians' fund raisers in Billings.

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  Plains Justice

  • Billings, Montana

  • Plains Justice Board Secretary

    • Mar 2010 - Present
    • Billings, Montana

    As Carrie LaSeur moved Plains Justice moved from Iowa to Billings, MT, I created a component of the board in Billings. That lead to Robert Merchant, pulmonologist as president of the board, and revamping the company to augment its legal expertise with scientific expertise. Sustaining the environment for Northern Plains families became our goal using this legal and scientific expertise. There are already many conservation advocacy organizations in this region, but we are unique in the expertise we bring. My most notable contribution has been to associate Plains Just with a sequence of talks in various venues associated with the local universities and the Montana Conservation Round Table. Recent talks include: Michael Fried (emeritus Math Professor UC Irvine) Wilderness, Science and the Montana Mystique, September 26, 2012Alan H. Lockwood: (emeritus Medical Doctor at U. of Buffalo) The Silent Epidemic - Coal and the Hidden Threat to Health, March 18th 2013Jay Kirkpatrick (former Dean: LS&A MSU-Billings): Stewardship of Wild Horses and Urban Deer, April 16th 2013John Tubbs (MT Dept. of Water Conservation): A plan water demand on the Yellowstone River Basin that will go to the Governor and legislature by January 2015, September 17 2013

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  Yellowstone Art Museum

  • Board Member

    • 2009 - Present

    My most notable contribution has been the creation, fund raising and running of the ''Art Trails: Ascent to the Rockies,'' Conference, November 11 and 12. This featured eight renown regional artists. The key ingredient to the success of this conference – good audience, great questions of the participants, and ability to pay for the event and the receptions – was concentration on the artists. That included both the artist participants, and local artists who comprised a significant portion of the audience. There was a gripping testimonial from the Artist speakers, among whom were Molly Murphy, Pat Zentz, John Giarrizzo, Katie Knight. They averred they have rarely (some said never) had a chance to speak among and with such talented piers. It is all about the art, and the local collectors, docents, and art appreciators, agreed with that in spades.

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  University of California at Irvine

  • Irvine California

  • Professor of Mathematics

    • Sep 1974 - Sep 2004
    • Irvine California

    I left UCI for temporary positions at many places during the official time I was there. That included three fellowships: 1. Fulbright Fellowship in Finland, 2. Lady Davis Fellowship at Hebrew University, and the most lucrative of all, 3. A Senior Research Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship split between the Institute of Mathematics at Essen (with Gerhard Frey) and Erlangen University (with Dieter Geyer). It also included Visiting Professor Positions in France and Israel.My relation with my first wife brought me to Irvine in the first place, relinquishing eventually the far better position at Stony Brook. My relation with my second wife caused me to return after Florida, from the far better position I had there. There were, however, benefits to being in the UC System. While they didn't include salary (my salaries were much higher at Stony Brook and at Florida), there was the retirement system, the health system, and the generous sabbaticals. I was able to get positions during sabbatical in departments with better research atmospheres, and no teaching at all. Further, at UCI my high position in the department allowed me to teach very little while I was there, though I took the teaching seriously whenever I did it. While continually traveling was always hard, in a sense I was able to cobble together something vaguely akin to an endowed chair. Precarious but full of adventure in exotic places where I practiced living partly outside the academic atmosphere, for which the only thing I really enjoyed were ambitious demanding lectures by people who knew what they were doing.

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  Hebrew University

  • Jerusalem Israel

  • Professor of Mathematics

    • Sep 1986 - Jun 1989
    • Jerusalem Israel

    A time period shared with my position at University of Florida. In 1992-1993 there was a year – at the Institute for Mathematics – dedicated to the topic "Field Arithmetic," the title I gave my book co-written with Moshe Jarden. The mathematical event was based on Joint work with Voelklein (see my time at U. of Florida). A section of the AMS classification was later called "Field Arithmetic." Later still there was a semester dedicated to co-writer (on theta functions and differential forms on Riemann Surfaces) Hershal Farkas' 60th birthday. Before and after these visits there were many other trips to Israel related to work with co-writers Farkas, Jarden and Haran.I met my 2nd wife in Spring 1977 in Jerusalem, a Finnish woman with whom I had three children. After that divorce I had a many year relation with a Jewish woman who lived in Jerusalem and was a lecturer at Hebrew University. I often express my relation to Israel as follows. Jimmy Carter and I both came to Israel often, starting around the same time, and often overlapping our visits. Clearly we had different relations to Israel, yet, our views of it are extremely compatible, as expressed in two of Carter's books. When I'm asked to relate anything about my mathematical career, I find audiences are far more interested in what I saw as I lived seriously in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.

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  University of Florida

  • Gainesville, Florida Area

  • Professor of Mathematics

    • Sep 1986 - Jun 1989
    • Gainesville, Florida Area

    John Thompson invited me to come to Florida to work with him. This was far-and-away the most important time in my career, because it brought the recognition that took me out of the really bad atmosphere of the department at UCI. Again, there were seminars, visitors, and the post-doctorals initially attracted to Thompson. They actually ended up working with me. Especially: The two most important geometry papers of my early career: "Galois Groups and Complex Multiplication" and "Fields of Definition ... of Hurwitz Spaces" in the decade before, now came to fruition. With Pierre Debes it was in recognizing Mazur's results as having a generalization connection regular realizations of dihedral groups to cyclotomic points on hyperelliptic Jacobians. I later turned that into my most important project: Showing the full Regular Inverse Galois problem interpreted as properties of the projective systems of varieties I called Modular Towers, that included systems of modular curve towers as the simplest case. With Helmut Voelklein I used fundamental properties of Hurwitz spaces -- comparing the inner and absolute spaces -- to give the first group presentations of the absolute Galois group, G_Q of Q. In this case, as presented in talks all over Europe, that G_Q has as quotient a free group on a countable number of generators, with kernel an infinite product of symmetric groups. The real result here, though was a vast generalization of a famous conjecture of Shafarevich, a proof of a great body of cases, and an argument that showed why probably it was correct. Most significant, we saw more deeply into the inverse Galois problem's significance. Finally, Thompson was now taken with two aspects of my early career. 1. Evidence from my proofs of Schur's conjecture, in various forms, and the relation of that to Serre's Open Image Theorem, allowed me to conjecture the genus 0 problem. 2. Practical solutions beyond the limits then known to the inverse Galois Problem.

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  Stony Brook University

  • Stony Brook, Long Island

  • Associate Professor of Mathematics

    • Sep 1969 - Jun 1974
    • Stony Brook, Long Island

    Chairman of the department was Jim Simons, CEO of Renaissance Hedge Fund. When Hedge Fund managers were called before Senate in 2011 to account for their "quaint" tactics, Simons was their spokesman. I thought you'd find that more interesting than my Solution of the 50 year old Schur Conjecture, of Davenport's Problem, the 1st serious technique on the Inverse Galois Problem, and the invention of the Galois stratification procedure for the theory of finite fields. During this time I got an Alfred P. Sloan foundation grant and used it to spend a semester each at MIT, University of Michigan, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Columbia University.I went to Stony Brook to the behest of James Ax, then the most recognized algebraist in the world. Ax was troubled anytime I understand things he did not. He was universally acknowledged as unstable. Maybe why he was successful – despite not much work – as a mathematician? He left mathematics soon after. The "monodromy method" and the "Galois stratification" were my most original early inventions. Still, they met tremendous resistance at the time. Only many years later were they grudgingly given recognition. The problem was the use of coverings beyond the aptitudes of either algebraists or Riemann surface people: Too much group theory interpretation. Still, by the 2010's many sophisticated papers using my concepts, and almost exactly my notation, were solving problems with the methods. Example late 1990s: I met Francois Loeser when he and I were two of the five speakers at Yasutaka Ihara's retirement conference. In the early 1980s I told Jan Denef how to use Galois stratifications as coefficients of Poincare series to attach zeta functions to any diophantine statement. Denef didn't understand the Chebotarev analog. At the conference Loeser presented their collaboration based on my suggestion. He added mapping Galois stratifications into Chow motives. That made the assignment canonical. He generously noted my work.