User:Lgearhart

I was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in May of 2003, and turned 55 years old that year. To put it briefly, then, I am a retread. It was not my first retread experience. Although I am successful as a priest in ordinary terms, I feel I have not yet found my destination.

I received a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1975 from the University of Illinois at Chicago (my major professor was the late James W. Moeller, a student of Peter D. Lax) and began teaching at the University level in September of that year. I taught Math at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA, during the 1976-79 academic years. My chief contribution to the field is a paper I published in the 1978 Transactions of the American Mathematical Society (Volume 236, February 1978), entitled "Spectral Theory for Contraction Semigroups on Hilbert Space", and which has been cited by 328 other articles or books. The main result of the paper is often called "The Gearhart Spectral Mapping Theorem".

I began working for a series of Defense contractors in 1979, and I've either published or coauthored several papers for conferences. In short, I became a computer geek. In the summer after my first year in the seminary, I constructed two projects, one of which I contributed as project to SourceForge.net, entitled | Browser-Independent Javascript Widgets in November of 2004.

I've been getting on in years (I'm currently 71), but I still dabble in Internet projects - now on the application side. I have two Drupal blogs and one Wiki, which I have most recently been upgrading to the latest stable versions.