Me at Niagara Falls, July 31, 2007

Galen Huntington's Homepage

Welcome to my personal page!

I have completed a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley ("Cal"), the present host of this page. I am reachable by E-mail at however, as I get gobs of mail, mostly junk, I may miss legit correspondence, for which I can but apologize in advance.

I replaced my flashier web page from 1998 with this simple but more contentful one in January 2007.

Projects

To be updated/expanded... someday

• World population clock. An old project to teach myself Javascript, it remains useable, and oddly popular.
• GFonts. A package I wrote to handle font sizes in (plain) TeX in a clean and consistent manner. I include an example to document its use. Thirteen years old, it may be now obsoleted by better packages, but I used it for my undergraduate and graduate theses.
• Random stuff.
  • My old web page. A mock web page I put together years ago at an old job, it acquired a small cult following, and I preserved it.
  • Some (old) pictures of me.

About me

I was born in Monmouth County, New Jersey, part of the Edison–New Brunswick division of the New York metropolitan area, but grew up in the Eugene, Oregon area. I attended Magnet Arts Elementary and South Eugene High before moving to Portland, Oregon for college.

I received a B.A. in mathematics at Reed College in 1997. My undergraduate thesis, Lambdas, Lists, and Laziness: Some issues in computer language design, investigated functional programming. My advisor was Joe Buhler, who has since left the College.

In Fall 1998 I joined Cal's interdisciplinary Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science, where my primary area was mathematics. I took a few semesters away, which partly accounts for my long stay. My last qualifying exam was on December 19, 2001 and I "advanced to candidacy", which apparently constitutes a degree. My initial interest was philosophy of mathematics, then for a while I pursued computational biology. I adopted my final topic, which I dubbed "computational model theory", in August 2004.

My doctorate was conferred on December 20, 2008. My thesis, filed two days earlier, examined practical computer-aided methods for solving a class of open problems in probability theory. My advisor was Branden Fitelson in the philosophy department.

I remain interested in functional programming and now primarily use Haskell for personal programming, as I did for my thesis. My computer runs the Linux distribution Ubuntu (Karmic) with Fvwm. I travel when I can, most often to Portland and sometimes to New York. I was raised vegetarian; I am now ambivalent about the practice, but keep to it. I politically lean to the right and am most concerned about mass immigration. I drink too much coffee.

I still live in Berkeley, though my ties to it are diminishing. I am on a break from toil but mulling long-term job prospects.