While I studied calculus long ago on my way to a biology degree at the University of Missouri, and later used numbers extensively — as a research assistant at Harvard’s Fearing Laboratory, as a graduate student at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, as an analyst for the White House Office of Management and Budget, and as a staff member of the Appropriations Committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate — I have done nothing to qualify myself as a mathematician.
In college I decisively disqualified myself. I left high school as an excellent physics student, aimed toward university with grand notions of studying physics and cosmology. However, math exams distressed me so much that the friendly equations I’d happily worked with the night before in the dorm became tangles of foreign symbols. I was like an actor who could perform well enough during rehearsal, but could not remember his lines once on stage. Without strong math skills, I reasoned, I’d never make it as a physicist, so switched to biology.
From there my life arced away from physics and math, to a career in biology, environment, and later to high level governmental work on science, environment and homeland security issues. I was content in my office on Capitol Hill, working hard among peers I enjoyed on big things. Then one day my wife said she wanted to make a career change and move to Boston and asked if I’d be willing to make a big change. I said, “Sure. But I want to do something creative.”
So here I am, trying to be a modern day Ben Franklin or Leonardo da Vinci. Lacking the requisite genius of these two men, it’s been slow going. And it’s audacious. The risk of failure is great. Forgone wages are noticed. But here is the thing – I believe average people like myself — if willing to look at science, art, engineering, mathematics, etc., with fresh eyes, to ask naive questions without fear, work obsessively, and willingly present ideas to unfriendly conventional criticism — might uncover interesting things. Or simple mathematical truths, like the prime hexagon. And to me, doing this is would be an amazingly satisfying achievement.
So on these pages, with the humility a non-mathematician must have in so doing, present my discovery of the the prime hexagon, its possible relationship to pi, my efforts to understand that linkage, and other findings I will layout as they are ready.
In the spirit of Franklin and da Vinci, I should have many projects. Here are a few others:
- Finding and re-creating an amazing telescope of sorts that I believe may have been used in Elizabethan England, long before the invention of the telescope. The technology itself is remarkable and beautiful. Either it was discovered in the 16th Century by Thomas Digges, or by me in 2014 — either way I’m pleased. See more at my outdated site constructed for a contest pitch: 007telescope.com
- Seeking to construct a public art installation based on the telescope technology described in the video above (just setting to work on this).
- Final phases of developing a reflecting system for sound, light, and other, but as it has no patent protection I must be discrete for awhile longer.
- And, of course, like any contemporary ‘creative’, I’ve been writing my Great American Novel. Nothing published or even close, but I hope you will read these, yes, Amazon reviews – as a light hearted down payment.
Thank you for your interest in my work.
That’s me. I know, I’ll work on a better picture, but I don’t have much to work with.