User Portlet

I started in the humanities, receiving a PhD in philosophy from Brown University in 1980, specializing in epistemology. I taught as a visiting professor at the college level for a few years and during that time, tried to find a tenure-track position. Since a tenure-track position never materialized, I left the philosophy profession and retooled in computer science, earning my MS in computer science from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1986.

After working as a software developer for a few years, I was hired by SAS Institute in 1993. I started my career at SAS working directly for John Sall (one of the co-owners of the company) on his product called JMP. At that time, JMP ran only on the Macintosh; sales were very poor and the future of the product was uncertain. My assignment was to guide the JMP development team in their effort to port JMP to Windows. After that project was completed, the Windows version of JMP became a huge success. Eventually, I became the first director of JMP R&D. Later, I moved over to the Econometrics and Time Series (ETS) group to help port key SAS ETS procedures to SAS's next-generation, massively parallel, distributed computing platform, which later became known as Viya. I worked at SAS Institute for 25 years and retired at the end of 2018.

Over the years, as my schedule would permit, I have taught undergraduate mathematics courses as an adjunct professor at various colleges and universities in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area. I was very honored to have the opportunity to teach advanced calculus and ordinary differential equations in the mathematics department at UNC-CH, particularly since I don't have an official Master's degree (let alone PhD) in mathematics.

I started using Mathematica when v3.0 was released, and have been an enthusiast ever since.

I formed Harper Corditt Software in 2019 to develop M2SLink, which is an add-on for Mathematica that makes it possible for SAS and Mathematica to connect. For a long time, I have believed that SAS users would benefit greatly by using Mathematica to visualize (and even analyze) their data. But since they had no convenient, efficient way to import their SAS data sets into Mathematica without loss of data integrity and could not run their SAS programs from within Mathematica, I knew this was never going to happen. At the same time, I was aware that there are Mathematica users who don't use SAS but who nevertheless have access to SAS data sets that they'd like to visualize/analyze in Mathematica, but until now had no easy, robust way to do that. M2SLink was designed to solve these problems. I am very proud to be a Wolfram developer partner and to have M2SLink available for sale at the Wolfram store.