Joseph A. Corneli was born in Steven's Point, Wisconsin, in 1979, and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from New College of Florida in 2002. His publication credits to date include co-authorship of two papers in differential geometry and an editing credit for the Free Encyclopedia of Mathematics (with Aaron Krowne and Ross Moore).
Mr. Corneli has a long-standing interest in anthropology (which first flourished under the tutelage of Luther P. Gerlach of the University of Minnesota), and indeed, he claims he began to seriously study mathematics in the spirit of participant observation. His interest in mathematics proper grew, and after four years at New College of Florida, he enrolled in the mathematics Ph. D. program at the University of Texas (Austin). Here, however, interest in matters outside of the core mathematics curriculm surged to the fore, and he quickly realized the extreme difficulties that face a researcher with a double area of interest working within the confines of a standard degree program.
His intellectual focus then shifted to general hackery. During this period, he read works in philosophy and metamathematics, attended several classes in the computer science department (including a seminar in "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" led by Bruce Porter), worked as a summer intern at Cycorp, Inc., began submitting his own code to the GNU Emacs Sources mailing list, and became increasingly involved in the "alternative" mathematics community that has grown up around the PlanetMath.org website.
Through these avenues and others, he began to explore the possibility of developing a computational system that bears the same relationship to mathematics that GNU bears to UNIX, i. e., a complete, free remimplementation, or simulation, of the original. His name for this proposed system is "The Hyperreal Dictionary of Mathematics". Unlike the proposed QED repository of formalized mathematics and the projects that grew up around the QED manifesto, the HDM project has focused from the beginning on developing tools that are immediately accessible to average mathematicians and students.
His current research focuses on developing the parsing and reasoning tools that form the foundation of this system.
Mr. Corneli resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Suggestions welcome, but please do not deface or defame.
--jcorneli Sun Jun 19 00:23:08 2005 UTC