User:Finn (John T)

My name is John T Finn; just Finn to those who know me (I tried to give myself the user name Finn, but it's taken.)

I'm a Gringo, which term I use loosely and a bit pejoratively for U.S. citizens whose ancestors immigrated more than one or two generations ago. Besides English, I read, write, speak, and sing in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Russian.

Born on 1946, I went to Army brats’ high school in Würzburg, Germany, and one year to a snotty rich kids’ prep school. After a year of college, I dropped out and lived in the San Francisco area for a few years, then moved to Vermont. In ’71 I went back to college and after graduating in 73 “taught” high school for a couple of years, then went to grad school and got an MA in math in 78.

Since then I’ve worked mostly as a math teacher, including some 13 years at Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire), a year at the University of Puerto Rico (Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez, donde conducía todas mi clases en español), and a couple of years at other colleges and universities in California and Boston.

But I’ve also worked in the trades --carpentry, plumbing, stone masonry, and such -- and done farm work, like milking a herd of 36 Guernseys at night while a math teacher at Dartmouth during the day.

Harmonic analysis, continuous probability, and analytic number theory are favorites of mine. I like reading in the original language Euler, Riemann and others from the times before the math establishment starting thinking of its subject as a sub-branch of pedantry.