This is a self portrait. Not great, but better for identifying me than
some of the others I could put up. Click on the picture if you want to
see a larger version.
Social Science Computing
310 McNeil Building
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6265
+1 (215) 898-3419
pat@ssc.upenn.edu
I deal with databases in two senses of the word. I am the database administrator for our Oracle database. Also I maintain and write applications for our Oracle database intended to help the user and make things run more smoothly on our UNIX systems. I also deal with the machine readable datasets for secondary analysis that we maintain. Some of my applications are related to using these datasets so the two senses of database are interrelated.
My background is in math so I have been told that it is not surprising that relational databases make sense to me. Specifically I have a B.S. in math from Harvey Mudd College, an M.A. in math from Temple Univ., and a Ph.D. in math learning (an individualized major) from Penn. I go back to second generation computers and if I had not encountered a view than computers and math were completely separate areas probably would have done graduate work in some way related to computers.
My older son, Martin, went all the way to his Ph.D. in math. He is a probablist. Martin is a member of the math department at SUNY - Albany. If want you can check out his home page where he has some preprints if you are interested in math.
You would think that my younger son, Jeff, would want to get out of our shadow but he was an undergraduate math major and is now working on his Ph.D. in math at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Jeff's field is lie algebras. If you want you can see what Jeff has to say about himself.
