Professor
Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics
Case Western Reserve University

208 Yost Hall
ese3 [at] case.edu


Hello, and welcome. I am a professor of mathematics at Case Western Reserve University. I am currently on a year-long visit to Jon Keating's random matrix theory group at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, supported by a Simons Fellowship.

I got my Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University; my advisor was Persi Diaconis. Persi's fun; you should talk to him sometime. My research is in probability and analysis. I tend to be most interested in situations in which probability arises naturally in other fields, e.g. differential geometry, convex geometry, and number theory. These days I mostly work in random matrix theory (which has connections with all of the above). I started out as a Stein's method person, and I'm still interested in the continuing development and exciting new applications of the method.

I've just completed a monograph on the random matrix theory of the classical compact matrix groups, published by Cambridge University Press. You can download the full text here. Prior to that, Mark Meckes and I wrote a text book for a first rigorous course in linear algebra (imaginatively titled "Linear Algebra"), also available from Cambridge University Press.

I am very interested in mathematical writing, and I am also involved in mathematical outreach; the two go hand-in-hand (at least for me). Here and here you can find a two-part series called "The Laws of Probability" that I wrote for the Girls' Angle Bulletin. The first part is an introduction to the idea of axiomatic probability and the law of large numbers. The second is an exposition of the central limit theorem. The goal was for these to be accessible to an interested lay audience.

Some personal thoughts I wrote down when Karen Uhlenbeck was awarded the Abel prize.

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