Though I was born in 1974 in San Francisco, to which I still have residual allegiances, I grew up in Rehovot, Israel, near the Weizmann Institute of Science. Since 1988 (as well as '80-'82) my family has lived in Stony Brook, home of the State University of New York (SUNY). There I attended Ward Melville High School My senior year I participated in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, toured with the orchestra, and so on, culminating with a trip to DisneyWorld during graduation!

The next four years I spent at Princeton University, where I concentrated in mathematics. This is where I lived and ate my upperclass years - the (vegetarian) Two Dickinson Street co-op ("2D"). I was a member of the University Orchestra, playing violin and viola - probably the best part of college..

Every summer during my Princeton years (and the entire spring term of junior year) I spent at the Geometry Center in Minneapolis. This was a wonderful place, where I met many great people. It was devoted to the interaction between mathematics and computers in the realms of education and research, and unfortunately was terminated in August 1998. I was there as a visitor, summer program participant and finally as an apprentice . Tour their award-winning interactive web and java applications, and the graphics archive. Check out Deva van der Werf's Teichmuller Navigator, part of a group of projects on Riemann surfaces I helped supervise with Paul Burchard. Here are some images I was involved in making. Some of these made it into the October 1993 Scientific American cover story, where I appeared for comic relief (my hair was compared with that of Harpo Marx!)

Between 1994 and 1999, I was officially a graduate student at Harvard where I enjoyed playing in the Bach Society Orchestra and meeting a wide variety of people in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Spring Semester of 1997 I spent back to Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, during their Quantum Field Theory special year. My adivsor, Edward Frenkel, is now at the Berkeley Mathematics Department , and so I got to live in Berkeley from 1997 to June 1999, when I graduated (from Harvard). After graduation I spent 1999-2003 as a Dickson Instructor in Mathematics at the University of Chicago, (supported partly by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation). Chicago was a wonderful place, both mathematically (among other things the Beilinson-Drinfeld Geometric Langlands seminar filled up an exciting 6 hours a week!), personally and culinarily (I'm one of countless fans of Charlie Trotter's..)

Up: David Ben-Zvi 

Department of Mathematics
University of Texas, Austin
Office 10.168
(512)471-8151
benzvi@math.utexas.edu

Up: University of Texas, Austin Mathematics Department
Created: 1995? --- Last modified:2003