When not climbing in the Alps or open water swimming along the Côte d’Azur, I am an applied mathematician, geographic information systems (GIS) scientist, and software archaeologist. A retired a lecturer in mathematics and computer science at Johns Hopkins University, I am presently based in Nice, France.

I currently teach occasional seminars in the theoretical, historical and algorithmic foundations of GIS, and the mathematics of deep and machine learning at University College London (UCL), and at Sorbonne Université - Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris.

My mathematical research concentrates on developing solutions to the uncertain geographic context problem, on deriving an algebraic basis for the change-of-support issue in spatial-temporal data, and formalizing the underlying mathematics of the modified areal / temporal unit problems. .

Convinced that point-free geometries and contact algebras can be used as a deeper ontological and conceptual foundation for a more process, event based, and dynamic GIS, I am exploring the use of the formal structures of dynamic mereotopology and region-based topology.

Interested in preserving the early history of GIS and early applications of computer technology to spatial problems, I founded the Relic {Code} Lab, where our research is dedicated to the reconstruction and conservation of historic software—programs, algorithms, and computational systems that have historically shaped our digital world, but which are now technologically inaccessible or materially endangered.

Our work combines digital forensics, archival research, programming language history, and emulation to bring vanished computational objects back into view. We collaborate with libraries, museums, and archives to preserve fragile code and to document the intellectual, political, and social contexts that gave rise to these artifacts.

Our current conservation projects center on reconstructing the code of the Simulmatics Corporation, who revolutionized computational election and voting trend analysis in the 1960s; on preserving materials from the early use of computers in US congressional redistricting; conserving the early mathematical proof assistant, the Logic Theorist; and working on emulating the code found in the seminal Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography.

The author or editor of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller and NPR selection, MAP: exploring the world, I am now trying to turn a mess of mathematical course notes into the forthcoming book, Lectures on Mereotopology and the Ontological Foundations of Geographic Information Science.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, I find being close to the gentle hum of supercomputers, wondering about AI interpretability, and exploring the deep labyrinths of the renormalization group, strangely comforting.