While I was determined to be a scientist since about first grade (and I had won a regional math contest for middle-school children at Eastern Michigan University), my mathematical interests came to the fore when I finished fourth in the Michigan Mathematics Prize Competition when I took the contest on a whim in 1979/80. I joined the top students to compete for Michigan in the Altantic Region Mathematics League; these experiences helped me to decide to become a mathematician.

I attended the Honors College at Michigan State University majoring in physics and minoring in mathematics. I supported myself throughout college on a creative mixture of scholarships and grants, as well as tutoring, working at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, and serving as an undergraduate TA for the Mathematics department. I worked over 20 hours each week and had a Pell Grant.

I was fortunate to have extraordinary teachers and fellow students; they helped me to have a deep and rewarding experience at Michgan State. I won a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a Churchill Scholarship to study at Cambridge when I graduated in 1985. For some insight on my time there, here is a letter that Sheldon Axler wrote to support my applications that year. My life as a traveller also began while at MSU; each summer I went on a trip to the American West, and when I graduated I visited a friend who was in the Peace Corps in the Fiji Islands before I moved to Cambridge.

MSU prepared me well for Cambridge; I took the Mathematical Tripos Part III, receiving Distinction. I stayed at Cambridge to work on a Ph.D. under the direction of Graham Allan studying Banach Algebras. That did not go so well, due to my peripatetic ways, and I returned to the United States to attend the University of Chicago, where I met and married Sarah Witherspoon, and eventually received my Ph.D. in Mathematics under the direction of William Fulton.

Sarah and I had a series of jobs, working at the University of Toronto, then Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, then back at Toronto and again at MSRI before spending 1.5 years at the University of Wisconsin. Our daughter Maria was born just before we left Toronto. After Wisconsin, I started a tenure-track job at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but Sarah did not yet have a permanent position. Our son Sam was born while we lived in Amherst.

We finally left Amherst to assume faculty positions at Texas A&M University, where we remain to this day. Travel and family remain themes in our life; Since leaving Amherst, we have spent time in Berkeley (I ran a semester at the MSRI in 2004), Munich (Sarah was a Humbolt fellow 2005-6)—I also sent 2 months in Paris that year and we lost my Father just before I went to Paris. I was in Minneapolis in Spring 2007(I was involved with the IMA program on Applications of Algebraic Geometry and the family joined for June and July), Lausanne (Only me; I helped to organize a semester in Spring 2008 at the Bernoulli Centre), and Stockholm in Spring and Summer 2011 (Institut Mittag-Leffler for me and KTH for Sarah). We were at MSRI in Berkeley again in Winter/Spring 2013, as Sarah was a Research Professor with both research programs. I spent the Autumn 2014 at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, and we took our family (sans Maria, who is an Engineering Physics student at the University of British Columbia) for the academic year 2016–2017 in Toronto, me at the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences.

In 2018, I spent April at the Institut Mittag-Leffler, and then September and November at the ICERM, where I helped to organize the thematic semester on Non Linear Algebra. The year 2019 and beyond brought some changes. Sam started at Michigan State studying Physics and Mathematics in the Autumn, about the same time that Sarah became our department head, which limits her travel. I was Berlin at the Freie Universität Berlin as part of the 2019/2020 Winter Semester Algebraic Geometry: Varieties, Polyhedra, Computation, and left nearly on the last plane before air traffic shut down due to CoViD. Maria Graduated in Spring 2022, we lost my mother, and son Sam won a Goldwater Fellowship The year 2022 ended with Sam winning a 2023–4 Churchill Scholarship. View the press release from MSU. He is the first second-generation Churchill Scholar. Now that the academy is moving back to a new normalcy, this story should continue.