Note: You may prefer to see my profile on this other useful website, which has both more detail and more pictures of me, but you'll need to sign up for that to see the whole thing.
Hi! I'm Harry Altman, aka Sniffnoy. You might have encountered me on the internet before. I do math, and in particular I can talk your ear off about the problem of writing numbers with ones, addition, and multiplication! And lots of variants of the problem. I won't do that here though, I'll save that for later. :D
Also I like infinities. I've also been working a bunch on doing silly things with infinities. This is actually much easier, but unfortunately it's way harder to explain to people! Again, best saved for another time. :) Also various other math things, like some neat Fibonacci things recently, but, uh, this isn't supposed to be a research statement, so I'll move on to a different topic. :P
I don't actually have an academic position anywhere, so for 5 years I was working a programming job to support my math habit. :) But that's come to a close now so now I have a lot more time to get other things done again!
I guess, I like things that are a bit off from what people expect. Sometimes, as in my mathematical work, these things are quite natural -- but nature doesn't always meet your expectations! Or (to take a page from Yudkowsky's book), I should say that people's expectations don't always meet nature. Sometimes nice questions have nasty answers, and I like to disgust people with them. :D And sometimes nasty-seeming constructions have nice results, and I like to amaze people with them! Basically, I like perverse answers to natural questions and natural answers to perverse questions. 😁
But I'm interested in the artificial as well as the natural; a thing I find really fascinating is, like, bizarrely complicated conventions and understanding where they come from and all the weird cases they generate. Things like text encoding (particularly Unicode) and data encoding in computers; unusual calendars (it's fun to explain the Hebrew calendar to people 😁); and other such things. So many things that appear to not make sense, the reason is, it used to make sense, but then it wasn't updated when circumstances changed!
I also like taking pictures of the local wildlife, which mostly means bugs and birds. :) Here in New York mostly birds, I don't see a lot of good bugs here. Although there are rats! :D Of course, rats don't like light or people, which makes photographing them tricky, but it can be done! Back in Ann Arbor I'd see a lot more good bugs.
Perhaps my favorite thing that anyone has ever said about me: "Harry, you are very good at making arguments, but you are not good at not doing annoying things with the cat toy." 😁
I would say that if you're curious, playful, and determined, you should drop me a line. :) Or if you've got a good rabbit hole you want to tell me about, I'd be interested to hear! :D
(Also, I tend to be a bit of a rule-follower, so it might be nice if you're a bit of a rule-breaker to balance me out. 😛)