Andrew McEachern

About

I am a science fiction and fantasy junkie with a book hoarding problem. At last count my home has over 300 science fiction and fantasy books threatening to destroy the poor bookshelves which are burdened with them. I am also a fan of the world’s first roleplaying game; by fan I mean I think about it way more often than I should. I think it may have to do something with the fact that in those games we use mathematics to determine the direction of stories, and mathematics and stories are two of my favourite things.
I am interested in mathematics outreach at all levels, and any elementary or high school teachers that are interested in having me visit their schools are welcome to email me. I wrote a blog with a co-author who was a professor at the University of Guelph about games and mathematics in general, called Dan and Andrew’s Game Place. At some point I might start writing it again.

Research Interests

My research has spanned a couple of very different areas. My graduate work was in bioinformatics and my advisor was the late Daniel Ashlock. I applied evolutionary algorithms to the short string DNA analysis problem and developed some techniques for visualizing DNA sequences, and other interesting phenomena, as part of that project. You can read my thesis here if interested. During my time at Queen’s University, I learned a great deal of game theory of all kinds, and so I spent a couple of years working in that area and wrote a textbook that was the synthesis of the notes for a course I built.

Sub-Discipline

Applied Mathematics

Research Areas