Profile

I graduated from Rose in 1965 and immediately went on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I received my Ph.D. in mathematics. Graduate school was a challenge, but Rose had prepared me well. It is ironic that after graduating from an engineering school such as Rose, that my research area (noncommutative) algebra is one of the most abstract in mathematics.

At Rose-Hulman I double-majored in computer science and mathematics, and I went on to earn my PhD in computer science from Indiana University. At both schools I took a lot of math courses across a broad spectrum of topics, and I enjoyed all of them. My research was in the area of programming languages, and I used Scheme to implement my ideas. Scheme uses functions as its main means of abstraction and is thus impedance matched with mathematics and algorithms.

With the exception of research leaves, I have spent my career at Wake Forest University where I am Professor of Mathematics. I still love all aspects of math from simple problems, to its history, to discussing it with students and colleagues, to working on hard (to me) questions. A few years ago in Sunday School we went around the class giving things for which we were thankful (it was near Thanksgiving), and I found myself saying that I was thankful for a career in which I spent much of my time having the fun of working puzzles, which is the way I view most interesting math problems. I even have a collection of mathematical postage stamps; part of my collection can be found online at http://www.wfu.edu/~kuz/Stamps/stamppage.htm.