My undergraduate degree majors (B.A. and B.S.) were mathematics, computer science, and education. I have taken numerous graduate courses in a variety of subjects, as well. I enjoy learning.

My favorite area of mathematics is number theory. I loved proofs in geometry class in high school. I am fascinated by Fermat's Last Theorem, Goldbach's Conjecture, and Mersenne primes. One of the first computer programs I wrote for fun was one to find prime numbers. I was one of the only students without a calculator in high school, so I happily used the logarithm tables in the appendix of my math textbook, often finishing calculations faster than those with calculators. In college, I took the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition exam, which was incredibly fun (lots of proofs).

I find languages fascinating and have studied French, German, Spanish, and Russian, as well as a little Arabic, Latin, and Old English. I have also studied some Native American languages in linguistics classes, such as Kalapuya and Takelma, as well as looking at other languages in the Penutian language family. I thought it was fun to learn new alphabets, which I did in my Russian and Arabic classes. I also like learning different rules of grammar. I have also looked at Sanskrit and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but only a little years ago, so I am not sure I remember much of them.

I focused on Native American subtopics in my graduate classes of linguistics, archaeology, cultural anthropology, music history, cultural geography, and art history. My first linguistics class on Native American languages covered the Penutian languages of the Pacific coast area from Canada to South America, so those cultures are the ones to which I devote more time than others.