I was born and grew up in Toronto, receiving my early education at Allenby and Armor Heights Elementary Schools, Ledbury Park Junior High School and Lawrence Park Collegiate from which I graduated in 1965. I have a BSc (Honours) from the University of Toronto where I took the famous MPC programme (Math, Physics, Chemistry). In 1973, I received a PhD in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia. My thesis, written under the direction of C. T. (Tim) Anderson, was entitled "Irreducible Representations of Algebras" and was the start of a life-long interest in nonassociative structures of all sorts.
Some years ago, it was drawn to my attention that I am a ninth generation Gauss student, my pedagogical ancestry going back through Anderson, Kleinfeld, Bruck, Brauer, Schur, Frobenius, Weierstrass, Gudermann and finally to the great man himself, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. I was a member of the APICS Mathematics/Statistics Committee for over ten years and chair for four. I have served the Canadian Mathematical Society in various capacities throughout my professional career and was the 2004 recipient of the CMS Distinguished Service, an honour I will always cherish.After receiving my PhD, I was fortunate enough to land a job at Memorial University. Nearly 30 years later, I'm still here. So is a close friend, Michael Parmenter, with whom I studied at Toronto as an undergraduate. Mike's background was in group rings so, after some contact with loop theorists at an Oberwolfach meeting in 1976, it was not surprising that my interests turned to loop rings, which has become the primary focus of my research. I owe large debts of gratitude, in particular, to Orin Chein (Temple University) and the late Dan Robinson (Georgia Institute of Technology) for their substantial contributions to my work and interests in loops over the years.
Together with Eric Jespers and Cesar Polcino Milies, colleagues at Memorial and in Sao Paulo, respectively, I co-authored a book, Alternative Loop Rings (North-Holland Mathematics Studies 184, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1996). Cesar and I have had happy collaborations both in Canada and Brazil over the years. Mike Parmenter and I have also written a book, an undergraduate text entitled Discrete Mathematics with Graph Theory , which was published by Prentice-Hall in 1997 and went to a third edition in the summer of 2005. I am also the author of ``Linear Algebra: A Pure and Applied First Course,'' published by Prentice-Hall in 2003.
Somewhere along the line, I became a great devotee of TeX and Maple. I'm fairly proficient in the former and wish I knew a lot more about the latter. Some day...
I inherited a great love of the arts from my parents. My father was a pianist and organist all his life. I have a great love for classical music and, thanks to superb school music programmes at Ledbury Park Junior High School and Lawrence Park Collegiate in Toronto, learned to play the violin. For a number of years, I played with the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra.