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Background

My first major at OSU was Physics. I recall a lecture in a Classical Dynamics course wherein the instructor had to spend a day introducing, in a rather borish way, an entire branch of Mathematics called the Calculus of Variations in order to solve a problem. I vividly remember being more interested in the Mathematics than in the problem we were trying to solve. I didn't give up on Physics, but I did decide to explore Mathematics more deeply.

When I did eventually switch to Mathematics, my strong interest in computers pulled me into computational problems especially with regards to finite fields and cryptography. During an undergraduate cryptography class I wrote a paper which eventually became my "Writing Intensive Curriculum" or WIC paper for Mathematics.

Incidentally, I also wrote a WIC paper for Physics which was related to Astronomy, another interest of mine.

After years of Mathematics and Physics courses, I realized that I would probably need to graduate soon. Unfortunately, I had not pursued my interests in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Chemistry and it was quickly becoming clear that I needed to narrow my focus at least a bit.

It was then that I discovered OSU's Engineering Physics degree. Basically, if you've taken a couple of years of Physics classes and a few of the core Engineering courses (which I had during my EE phase) then you can apply to the Engineering Professional School and take pretty much any combination of Engineering courses you like and call it a degree. Eureka! I took the senior series in VLSI design, CPU architecture and other similar coursework all relating to computers. I wish I could find my paper describing the sound analyzer I built (A/D sampler -> FFT computer -> D/A -> oscilloscope) but alas.

After undergraduate school, I applied to the graduate school at OSU in Mathematics. Again I was drawn to finite fields and cryptography and eventually wrote a M.S. paper describing a computational approach to... well, if you really want to know you can read it here.

Math Papers