Info about Mark Phillips

Mark Phillips

Title: Technical Staff Manager
Dates: July 1, 1991 -- present
Office: Geometry Center, Room 535
Phone: (612) 626-8327
E-mail: mbp@geom.umn.edu
Personal Homepage: http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~mbp/

Activities at the Geometry Center

As technical staff manager, Mark coordinates the technical staff and equipment resources of the Geometry Center. This involves estimating the technical needs of possible future projects, allocating staff and equipment to current projects, tracking staff time spent on projects, hiring new staff, and planning and managing the Center's computer software and hardware environment. He also is actively involved in some of the projects himself. In particular, he serves as the software engineer for the Pisces project.

Mark was one of the authors of Geomview, the Center's 3D visualization system. In addition to working on the design and implementation of the core of the program, he wrote the parser for the Geomview command language, which allows Geomview to communicate with other software. He also wrote the Geomview user's manual. As a member of the technical staff, he has contributed to many of the Center's technical needs, including consulting with visitors, providing support for workshops and conferences, and organizing the Center's equipment and software.

Background

Mark received his BS in mathematics in 1982 from Davidson College in Davidson, NC. He attended graduate school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where he obtained an M.S. in applied mathematics in 1984, and then the University of Maryland, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1990. His thesis was on visual aspects of complex hyperbolic geometry. He spent one year on the faculty of the math department at the University of Richmond in Richmond, VA, and then joined the staff of the Geometry Center in July of 1991.

Education

Ph.D. in Mathematics, 1990
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
Dissertation: Dirichlet Polyhedra in Complex Hyperbolic Space
Dissertation Advisor: Dr. William M. Goldman

M.S. in Applied Mathematics, 1984
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York
Master's Project: PHASE: A Computer Program for Generating Three-Dimensional Phase Space Diagrams of Ordinary Differential Equations.
Master's Advisor: Dr. Garrett M. Odell

B.S. in Mathematics, 1982 (magna cum laude)
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina
William G. McGavock Mathematics Award

Professional Experience

Employment

July 1991 -- December 1994, Technical Staff
January 1995 -- present, Technical Staff Manager
Geometry Center
University of Minnesota
1990 -- 1991: Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Richmond, Virginia
1984 -- 1990: Graduate Teaching and Research Assistant
Department of Mathematics
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
1985 (Spring and Summer): Instructor
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska
1982 -- 1984: Research Assistant
Center for Interactive Computer Graphics
Renssealaer Polytechnic Institute

Publications

(with Silvio Levy and Tamara Munzner) Geomview: An Interactive Geometry Viewer, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, October, 1993, pp 985-988.
Dirichlet Polyhedra for Cyclic Groups in Complex Hyperbolic Space, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 115, Number 1, May 1992.
(with Charles Gunn) Visualizing Hyperbolic Space: Unusual Uses of 4 x 4 Matrices, Proceedings of the 1992 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH, March 1992.
Mathematica as an Interface to an Interactive Mathematical Graphics Program, The Mathematica Journal, Vol 1 No 2, Fall 1990.
(with G. M. Odell) An Algorithm for Locating and Displaying the Intersection of Two Arbitrary Surfaces, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 4 No. 9, September 1984, pp 48-56.

Other Works

(with Leonidas Palios) Tetrahedral Breakup, Animation of Algorithms: A Video Review, DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, June, 1992.
Complex Hyperbolic Kleinian Groups, computer graphics videotape, October 1990, 13 min. This tape was shown on October 20, 1990 at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Amherst, Massachusetts.
A Tour of Heisenberg Space, computer graphics videotape, June 1990, 19 min.
HEISENBERG, an interactive computer program for exploring Heisenberg geometry, 1990.
Complex Hyperbolic Space, computer graphics videotape, November 1989, 13 min.
HYPERCAD, an interactive computer program for exploring hyperbolic geometry, 1989.
VIEWWLD, an interactive 3D visualization program for Sun workstations, 1988.
The Double Torus Unfolded, computer graphics film. August 1984, 60 sec.

Talks

Computer graphics as a visualization tool in mathematics Workshop on Systems Administration: The Mathematician's Perspective, Geometry Center, December 1994.
Software tools for visualization at the Geometry Center. SIAM Annual Meeting, San Diego, July 1994.
Interactive Real-Time Software for Mathematical Visualization; co-organized this special session, with George Francis and Norbert Quien, at the joint meeting of AMS and German Mathematical Society, Heidelberg, Germany, October 1993.
Geomview: an interactive geometry viewer. Experimental Mathematics seminar at University of Bonn, Germany, October 1993.
Visualizing non-Euclidean geometry. DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, April 1993.
Life in non-Euclidean space. St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, April 1993.
Communicating geometry: ideas and tools. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics meeting, Minneapolis, MN, November 1992.
Geomview. MSRI Workshop on Visualization of Geometric Structures, Berkeley, CA, October 1992.
Visualizing hyperbolic space. Mathematics Seminar, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, March 1992.
Visualizing hyperbolic space. ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive Computer Graphics, Boston, MA, March 1992.
Interactive 3D Graphics. Several presentations at workshop on Scientific Visualization Environments/IEEE Visualization Conference, San Diego, October 1991.

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Created: Nov 29 1995 --- Last modified: Feb 19 1996