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Revision as of 17:59, 30 April 2012 by Jcp (talk | contribs) (Fixed some grammatical errors)

Welcome to all Fedora Linux enthusiasts!

JCP is short for John C. Peterson.

My formal academic training is in the area of Mathematics and Physics (double major, BS), Applied Mathematics (MS), and Mechanical Engineering (MS). My interests in those disciplines continues to this day, with an emphasis on computational physics and engineering, computational logic, and computing for other scientific applications.

My earliest practical experience with computers dates back to the late 1960's. In the early 1980's, I worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, I was first exposed to UNIX, mostly because the Symbolic Manipulation Program, or SMP, (which eventually became what is known as Mathematica today), only ran on UNIX machines at that time. I also enjoyed working on the super-computers of that era (mainly the CDC 7600, and the CRAY-1S) while there.

I now live in San Diego, California and work on a consultant basis in a variety of scientific disciplines, (where computing is usually involved in some way or another). If Linux is to be used in the work, that is always a good thing in my book.

Why I Prefer Linux

The disciplines of Mathematics, Engineering and Science are inherently very collaborative endeavors. The open source development models used by Linux distributions such as Fedora, are both very familiar and comfortable for people like myself who are from these disciplines. In a Linux environment, the tools I use for computing can evolve with the Science as needed, and just exactly what they do can always be unambiguously verified by a direct inspection of the underlying source code.

Contributing to Fedora

I hope to assist with the advancement of Fedora by packaging new and useful tools for mathematics, engineering, and science. I have a high degree of interest in automated theorem proving, SAT and SMT solvers, and formal languages with a focus on both practical applications (e.g. software and hardware verification, systems biology) and formalized proofs in pure mathematics.

Other Hobbies

Some other prominent hobbies of mine include; amateur radio (Technician Class, KD6EKQ), general aviation (private pilot certificate with Glider, ASEL category ratings), and driving motorcycles, fixing them not so much (1973 Kawasaki Z1, 1989 Kawasaki ZX10).