Matt is excited to be visiting Carleton this year after teaching for eight years at New College Florida in Sarasota. A graduate of Minneapolis Southwest High School, Matt is happy to be returning to a place that has four real seasons. He has dearly missed autumn and the changing of the leaves! (The Cowling Arboretum on the edge of campus is amazing, but if you know of anywhere else in the area to find great leaves, please reach out to Matt before the snows come and autumn departs.) When he is not enjoying the novelty of changing seasons, Matt is looking forward to teaching Data Structures, Computer Networks, and Software Design [also Advanced Software Design!] to an amazing cohort of Carleton students this year.
Before he started teaching, Matt worked for a decade at BBN Technologies doing work on a variety of topics related to security, privacy and Internet technologies. As an example, Matt thinks that data traveling between two countries should not take unscheduled and suspicious detours through random other parts of the world. Therefore, Matt has spent a lot of time working to improve global routing technologies so that these sort of detours don’t happen. Through this work, Matt got to engage in a lot of really cool international collaborations, but also became way too familiar with the waiting areas in many of the world’s busiest airports. Random Trivia: There is a huge window on the East side of the Fiji airport, which offers an amazing view of the sun rising over the mountains of central Fiji. This makes Fiji one of the best world’s best airport in which to be unexpectedly stranded overnight.
In his free time, Matt enjoys juggling, reading historical romance novels, pondering the beautiful connections between theoretical cryptography and abstract algebra, and also petting cats. Matt always has juggling balls in his office (Olin 325) along with a copy of his favorite introductory juggling book (which is available if you would like to borrow it).