User:Voronwae

If you've come to this page to find out who I am, chances are you either hated or loved something I wrote on Wikipedia. Some brief and salient facts about me:


 * I started out on Arpanet in 1983 as a Usenet poster.
 * I majored in Astrophysics and Pure Mathematics at university.
 * My academic hobbies are mathematics and the history of science. I particularly enjoy analysis, although I could be just as happy as an algebrist.  My favorite time period in history is the hundred years or so after the births of Newton and Huygens, but there isn't really any period after 1500 that I don't enjoy.
 * My non-academic hobbies are writing both fiction and non-fiction, windsurfing, climbing, hiking, racquetball, building aircraft and carpentry. I also like to play chess.
 * I've helped organize eight academic conferences on engineering, construction and operations in space. I'm currently planning another academic conference on a physics-related topic.
 * I've worked professionally in computing since I was 15, in and out of hardware and software. I would rate myself a good systems architect, a lousy hardware designer and a decent programmer with occasional patches of creativity.
 * I've also worked professionally writing newspaper and magazine articles.
 * I'm highly compulsive. I have been informally diagnosed (without testing) with Asberger's Syndrome, although I haven't decided whether I believe in the syndrome or the diagnosis.
 * My analysis background and my compulsive nature once caused me to take a graduate course in technical editing, English 516 at UNM. I earned an A+ and grew even more compulsive.  Much of the time when I'm editing on Wikipedia it's not because I want to...
 * My father was an experimental nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. My mother is still a professor of cognitive psychology studying neural structure development in multilingual children in Mexico.  My younger sister is a biologist who counts frogs and salamanders.  I am very close in interests and temperament to my father.
 * I am single, and I do very little all day other than read, pet dogs and write, with the occasional break to go to the gym or make something. I have a feeling that I strongly resemble many Wikipedia contributors.