Triumph of the color Green

Dr. John Perry, OP

2022 special half-century edition

Personal information

Legal Name:
John E. Perry, III, Ph.D.
“Non-legal” name:
Jack

Vocation

Employer:
The Perry Disorganization
Role:
Father and Husband
Responsibilities:
Torturing the teenagers, worrying the wife, insecuring the income
Typical reviews on
performance evaluations:
  • “You’re a horrible human being.”
  • “I hate you.”
  • “Go away.”
Contact:
john.perry.math@ (no-spam-dudes) cantanima.name (remove the obvious) or devotus@yahoo.com

Previous appointments
PositionRoles (years)
Cog in a soul-devouring machine, Level II computer programmer (currently held)
  • Agile Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Development, Integration Testing, Unit Testing, …
  • Cargo, Git, Google Test, Webpack, …
  • C++, Java, Rust, Rust/C++ interoperability, …
  • Image processing,
  • Timesheet entry
  • …and other cool buzzwords
Cog in a soul-devouring machine, Level I Associate Professor of Mathematics (2005-2021:)
  • Teaching: usually Calculus I, Modern Algebra, Number Theory, Mathematical Computation (a programming class)
  • Research: roughly 10 papers over 15 years
    • multiple international co-authors
    • two papers authored with undergraduate students
    • top-cited paper in the Journal of Symbolic Computation for a short while
    • multiple internally- and externally-funded grants
  • Service: too much; the less said, the better
    • When a colleague took over my duties and realized how much work it was, she asked for an additional class release beyond what I’d had (and she received it).
Gear in a soul-devouring machine AP Calculus Reader, Consultant to another standardized test (2005-2015 or so)
Matter fed to a soul-devouring machine/ Graduate student in mathematics (1993-1995,1999-2005)
Quitter High school math teacher, Catholic seminarian, and more (1995-1999)
Overachiever Salutatorian, Fast food, Newspaper Delivery (1985-1989)

Unusual skills
  • not fitting in
  • writing much, saying little
  • independent, uh, “thinking”, if it can be called that
  • visiting places in Europe where absolutely no one speaks English
  • working on a lot less sleep than I should be having (like, uh, now)
  • entertaining myself for hours, days, months at a time, then wondering where everyone went
  • a handful of spoken languages, with a wide range of ability (from fluent to cringe-inducingly bad)
  • utilizing the Sacrament of Confession (you wouldn’t believe what I confess even if God Himself told you)
  • voting for a losing candidate in 7 of 8 presidential elections in a row — don’t blame me; I voted for the other guy — no, not that other guy, a different one

Notable accomplishments
Personal
  • making people smile, especially my wife
    (the fact that I do so by accident is irrelevant)
  • three children who haven’t disavowed me… yet
  • learning gratitude (though I’m not very good at it)
  • finding places in Europe where absolutely no one speaks English
  • teaching myself Modula-2, C, Eiffel, Java, C++, Python, Modula-3, Oberon, Kotlin, Ada, Rust, … probably others
  • successfully cooking pizza, tiella, lasagna, babà al rum, sfogliatelle, птичье молоко, bread pudding, banana pudding
Professional
  • several proofs and algorithms (2007, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2020)
  • resurrecting an old research problem, then strangling it again
  • helping several students who had given up make it to graduation and sometimes to advanced degrees
  • winning a grant award that would have been a dream opportunity — then declining it for the right reasons
  • writing a program that legitimately required roughly 1,000,000 times as much data as available on the computer I had growing up