James Gary Propp is a professor of mathematics at the

University of Massachusetts Lowell The University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell and UML) is a public research university in Lowell, Massachusetts, with a satellite campus in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It is the northernmost member of the University of Massachusetts public u ...

Education and career

In high school, Propp was one of the national winners of the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO), and an alumnus of the

Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in western South East England on the coast of the English Channel. Home to two major English cities on its south coast, Southampton and Portsmouth, Hampshire is ...

. Propp obtained his AB in mathematics in 1982 at Harvard. After advanced study at

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge beca ...

, he obtained his PhD from the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

. He has held professorships at seven universities, including Harvard, MIT, the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which ...

, and the

Mathematical research

Propp is the co-editor of the book ''Microsurveys in Discrete Probability'' (1998) and has written more than fifty journal articles on game theory,

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many a ...

and

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

, and

recreational mathematics Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited ...

. He lectures extensively and has served on the Mathematical Olympiad Committee of the Mathematical Association of America, which sponsors the USAMO. In the early 90s Propp lived in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the capital city, state capital and List of municipalities in Massachusetts, most populous city of the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financ ...

and later in

Arlington, Massachusetts Arlington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. The town is six miles (10 km) northwest of Boston, and its population was 46,308 at the 2020 census. History European colonists settled the Town of Arlington in 1635 as a village ...

. In 1996, Propp and David Wilson invented coupling from the past, a method for sampling from the

stationary distribution Stationary distribution may refer to: * A special distribution for a Markov chain such that if the chain starts with its stationary distribution, the marginal distribution of all states at any time will always be the stationary distribution. Assum ...

of a

Markov chain A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happen ...

among

Markov chain Monte Carlo In statistics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods comprise a class of algorithms for sampling from a probability distribution. By constructing a Markov chain that has the desired distribution as its equilibrium distribution, one can obtain ...

(MCMC)

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

. Contrary to many MCMC algorithms, coupling from the past gives in principle a perfect sample from the stationary distribution. His papers have discussed the use of surcomplex numbers in game theory; the solution to the counting of alternating sign matrices; and occurrences of Grandi's series as an

Euler characteristic In mathematics, and more specifically in algebraic topology and polyhedral combinatorics, the Euler characteristic (or Euler number, or Euler–Poincaré characteristic) is a topological invariant, a number that describes a topological spac ...

of infinite-dimensional

real projective space In mathematics, real projective space, denoted or is the topological space of lines passing through the origin 0 in It is a compact, smooth manifold of dimension , and is a special case of a Grassmannian space. Basic properties Construction ...

Other contributions

Propp was a member of the National Puzzlers' League under the nom Aesop. He was recruited for the organisation by colleague Henri Picciotto, cruciverbalist and co-author of the league's first cryptic crossword collection. Propp is the creator of the "Self-Referential Aptitude Test", a humorous multiple-choice test in which all questions except the last make

self-reference Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philos ...

s to their own answers. It was created in the early 1990s for a puzzlers' party. Propp is the author of ''Tuscanini'', a 1992 children's book about a musical elephant, illustrated by Ellen Weiss.

Awards and honours

In 2015 he was elected as a

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings ...

"for contributions to combinatorics and probability, and for mentoring and exposition."

Personal

He is married to research psychologist Alexandra (Sandi) Gubin. They have a son Adam and a daughter Eliana.Propp's page at UMass Lowell
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Notes

External links

Propp's website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Propp, Jim Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Harvard University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Harvard University faculty Alumni of the University of Cambridge Recreational mathematicians Probability theorists 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Fellows of the American Mathematical Society