Pictures

Fall 2005

Winter 2006

Passover 2006

Santa Cruz, July 2006

Best pie of Summer 2006

China, July 2007

Medellin, Colombia, July 2007

Frisbee photos

Sevilla, España, January 2010

Family

Partner

• Elen Oneal

Brothers

• Ethan
Jeremy
• Gavi
• Justin

Parents

• Ralph E. Miller
• Avis D. Miller

Ultimate Frisbee

• I play as much as I can, which usually ends up being twice a week, or so. Here in Durham, NC, it's not so remarkable to play through the winter. But even back in Minnesota, where I lived prior to now, we still weren't bothered by such trifles as "cold" or "snow": it's surprisingly unpainful to play outside in the middle of winter, even when it's -20 Celsius (around 0 Fahrenheit). In 2006-2007, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the frisbee players enjoy the cold reasonably as much as Minnesotans.   The sequence of two pictures above was captured by Dan Stedman (great shots, Skip!), a General Lee teammate, at Cooler 2006, in Delafield, Wisconsin. A couple of seconds after these photos were taken, Tiffany Davis (number 01, in orange -- duh!) was already in the end zone, where she caught the continuation pass. The defender is John Fieberg, also from the Twin Cities. More Frisbee photos, mostly General Lee in 2006 and 2007, but also one Huzzah team photo.

Music

• Here is a scan and analysis of a fugue I wrote, which (faded using the image viewing program ``xv'') doubles as the background for the page you're reading (that is my handwriting -- I work with a real calligraphy pen, dipped in ink). I dream someday of having links here to more of my music, including some Baroque style dances, inventions, preludes, etc. Maybe I'd scan in the symphonic material, too. With some luck, I'd even be able to set up a link to some sort of electronic performance of some of these things.
  
  My favorite composers are Bach, Dvorak, Schubert, and Handel. Mozart is sometimes quite good, too, but usually I prefer it when he's being serious (Mass in c, Requiem in d, later symphonies, some piano concertos). Palestrina and Victoria wrote some supremely beautiful counterpoint, but I unfortunately don't own much. I do also like various kinds of rock and popular music, but my feeling is that I can listen to that nearly anywhere, when someone else is playing it for themselves. So I listen mostly to classical at home.

Biology

• I did laboratory research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland for a few summers in a row in the early 90s, on gene regulation and expression in mammalian cells and yeast, and on protein interaction in yeast. To connect that prior life with my research mathematical career, during the 2007-2008 academic year I took part in the IMA Thematic Year on Mathematics of Molecular and Cellular Biology. That did not lead directly to any published work, but it primed me for the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) program on Analysis of Object Data, where I led a Working Group on data sampled from stratified spaces, which spent half its time discussing phylogenetic trees. The SAMSI program also included a workshop on interactions between evolutionary biology and statistics. These activities have, finally, led to current projects on: statistical methods for dealing with phylogenetic trees; classifying shapes of fruit fly wings; and analysis of brain vascular structure. The best part about all of this is getting to chat meaningfully with researchers in biology and statistics.

Physics

• Toward the end of grad school, I developed a side interest in theoretical physics. I never took physics beyond high school, but knowing some requisite math makes certain kinds of physics rather accessible, as these things go (e.g., quantum mechanics = quantum field theory in zero plus one dimensions).