00100	Statement of Purpose / Resume
00200	
00300	Between my junior and senior years of high school, I attended  a  NSF
00400	summer  science institute at Stevens Institute of Technology, where I
00500	took two courses:  abstract algebra and computer programming.  I  did
00600	well  in  the  algebra  course,  but --- I'd stay up all night in the
00700	computer lab.
00800	
00900	At Rice, I can say quite modestly, I was one of the top math students
01000	in  my  class.   My general education wasn't very well-rounded (or as
01100	much as I would like it to have been),  but  I  did  manage  to  take
01200	non-science  courses that I enjoyed.  Meanwhile, starting my sophmore
01300	year, I began working as a part time computer operator and programmer
01400	for  a  chemistry  prof,  writing a program for solving Shroedinger's
01500	equation for certain n-dimensional regions.  Between  my  junior  and
01600	senior  year,  I  took  off  for  the summer and wound up in New York
01700	working for the  Manhattan  Court  district  programming  their  jury
01800	selection  system  in COBOL.  My senior year, I worked for a computer
01900	service  bureau  doing  things  like  writing  recursive   accounting
02000	programs.  (recursive  because  one  day  the  guy  told  me to add a
02100	sub-record feature; the next day, sub-sub-records too --  so  I  just
02200	did it recursively).
02300	
02400	In  addition  to  my  regular  Math program, I took what few computer
02500	courses Rice offered and even organised one (on A.I).  I  applied  to
02600	two  schools for graduate work in math.  One was Princeton, the other
02700	Stanford.  Fortunately, I suppose, Princeton didn't admit me.  In any
02800	case, I came to Stanford.   I want to confess that one of the reasons
02900	I chose Stanford was the computer  science  department  --  I  didn't
03000	realize  that, unlike Rice, the Computer Science and Math departments
03100	were as divergent and separate as they are.
03200	
03300	Well, my draft board intervened,  and  as  I  was/am  a  Conscientous
03400	Objector,  I  was requred to work two years at a job "in the interest
03500	of national health, safety, or welfare." I asked Dr.  Buchanan  (from
03600	whom  I  was  taking  CS 226) about programming jobs "for the medical
03700	center", and eventually came to work for DENDRAL as a "lab assistant"
03800	programmer.
03900	
04000	It  was one of the more fortunate things that ever happened to me.  I
04100	think somewhere I had been subtly brainwashed that  computer  science
04200	"wasn't  a  science",  and  felt  resistant  to the idea that I might
04300	really be more interested in CS than math.  I know better now.
04400	
04500	I began as a programmer, spent a  while  trying  to  debug  the  LISP
04600	system and writing miscelaneous system features.  I sort of fell into
04700	an independant research problem that had been kicking around  DENDRAL
04800	for  a  while  -- that of "cyclic structure generation" (see papers).
04900	The problem suited me since it had "mathematical content" and yet was
05000	"immediatly  applicable".    I think this is the beuuty of much of CS
05100	research that appeals to me.    The program has  come  to  the  first
05200	stage  of  completion  (i.e.,  first  working version), we have three
05300	papers written and I am still working on a  fourth.   (I  must  admit
05400	that  for  papers  1  and  2,  although  I  did  both  the design and
05500	implementation of the algorithms, Prof Harold Brown wrote the  papers
05600	and proved the correctness of the algorithms.
05700	
05800	In  the course of working for DENDRAL, I've learned a lot -- I've sat
05900	in on many classes in the CS  Dept  (mainly  Combinatorics  seminars,
06000	Knuth's data structures); read up on current A.I. research, learned a
06100	lot of programming languages,  common  programming  techniques;  I've
06200	learned  a  lot  about  graph theory, Polya enumeration, chemistry...
06300	Currently I am an R.A. for DENDRAL (although I am registered  in  the
06400	math  department).   I  am  also a part time (8 hrs/week) employee of
06500	Xerox Research Center, working on the developement of BBN LISP.
06600	
06700	PLANS FOR THE FUTURE:
06800	
06900	I'd like to explore more within computer science (I really know  very
07000	little  about  NA, for example.) The field of greatest interest to me
07100	now  is  combinatorics,  or  combinatorial  algorithms.   Almost   as
07200	important,  I  am  interested  in  the  theory and techniques of A.I.
07300	(rather a broad statement, but then so is A.I).  I'd like to stay  an
07400	R.A.  for  DENDRAL,  try  to close off my work in the next year (much
07500	documentation to be done) & learn a lot more than I  know  now.   I'd
07600	also  like  to  get a degree in Computer Science -- hopefully without
07700	taking too long about it. It's true that I haven't  decided  in  what
07800	area  I  will  finally  write my thesis, but I have a few interesting
07900	projects still on the shelf.