User Portlet

I used Wolfram Mathematica 2.2.3 and 3.0 during the first two years of my undergraduate degree in Mathematics with Management at Imperial College during the years 1996-8.

After graduating, I 'defected' to accountancy, since this was where all the jobs seemed to be and since the work seemed to fit well with my analytical skills gained at university. I qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant in 2004, and I have worked in a wide variety of finance roles and industries in business and government, as well as a short spell in an accountancy practice. Some of my work in business involves applying basic mathematics, but this rarely goes beyond calculating a derivative for a system optimisation or calculating a probability of failure based on a normal distribution assumption.

During my time in the mathematics department at university, I was very impressed by the power of the modular Mathematica language, especially in terms of computing arbitrary precision arithmetic and processing lists as well as the more common graph plotting and numerous other functions. Having lost access to Mathematica (until Wolfram Alpha was released) after university, I wrote some software myself to deal with arbitrary precision arithmetic and algebra and tensor processing to work on hobby mathematical problems such as efficient semi-prime factorisation algorithms.

I am currently a regular contributor to the Unsolved Problems Yahoo Group at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/UnsolvedProblems/info.

Other than Mathematics and accountancy, my diverse areas of interests include classical music (I have played the piano for over thirty years), investments and investment theory, real time (financial) reporting, hill climbing, travel and learning new languages (other than English, I can speak varying levels of Bengali, Hindi, French, Spanish and Portuguese), history and historical buildings, cosmology and physics and reading fantasy books, among other things.