I am a computer scientist with an undergraduate degree from the University of Memphis. In my free time I research computer science, programming languages, human-computer interaction (HCI)—which involves user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design—and information theory, decision theory, behavioral economics, physics, game theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, pathology, social science, ecology (in the abstract sense), philosophy, and a limited amount of microbiology (just enough to read research abstracts and skim articles). I also play chess, and my performance level has hovered between 1700 and 1800 for the past year.
I started programming in early high school on a Texas Instruments TI-83+ Silver Edition calculator, using a structured language called TI-BASIC. My brother taught me how to write a for loop and a while loop, and I immediately recognized how powerful programming could be. I practiced programming several hours a day every day for 3 years. I developed a fractal generator on the calculator using imaginary numbers and iterative math (iterated function systems), as well as a black and white image compression algorithm, and I regularly programmed my calculator to do my math homework for me. The language provided no lexical scoping for variables, so all variables were accessible from all programs, making it difficult to guard the program from unwanted environment changes. When encountering a bug, the program editor would scroll all the way down to the line it errored on, so I had to write programs in reverse to speed up the debugging process. The calculator could only display 8 lines of text and 16 characters across, so I had to memorize all of my code.
I have a background in physics and mathematics. I earned a 33 composite score on the ACT (out of 36), and a 2000 on the SAT (out of 2400). My top ACT sections were Mathematics (34) and Science (35). I also earned a perfect score on the physics subject test for the SAT in 2007.