mgeorge001

I am from Montana. My family moved to San Diego around 1960. I did fairly well in school, and graduated with a major in Math and a minor in Philosophy from UCSD. I attended grad school in math at University of Washington, where my PhD thesis adviser was Terry Rockafellar. I gradually came to the realization that I wanted to go into experimental physics, so I transferred to the Physics Dept. John Rehr was my thesis adviser, and I worked on two of his then recent interests: second order differential approximants and partial differential approximants. I was not able to get a postdoc after graduating so I taught at University of Minnesota, then Arkansas State University, and after that at University of Memphis. Eventually, I left academia for a while and worked as an applied mathematician and software engineer for a military subcontractor. I did work at Camp Pendleton and at SPAWAR in San Diego. I lost my job in the dot.com crisis in the computer industry around 2000 and decided to go into part-time teaching. From there, I got employed as a physics technician. I retired in 2019, but continue to teach math. I am interested in topological phase transitions and more generally in quantum phase transitions. I have a pretty good background in the field of statistical physics, and am also rather focused on quantum field theory. I regard myself as an experimental physicist, although, of course, nowhere near an elite level.