I took summer classes at NC State one summer ; it was the first time I'd stayed in Raleigh over the summer, and it was also the first time I'd ever taken summer classes at university. An interesting experience, especially because I was starting to burn out on school by this time (and I still had a year left !).

This is a paper I wrote for an independent study in psychology during the spring semester of 2001. Dr. Kalat and I focused on Terrence Deacon's rather dense 1997 work, "The Symbolic Species," which discusses several interesting neuroscientific developments and attempts to relate them to the debate over language development in humans. I concentrated my efforts on the limits that Deacon's ideas pose to the Chomskyan concept of Universal Grammar.

This is a brain dump that I produced just after a brief encounter with theft and the law. It was a strange experience, not only because of the incredibly deep social justice issues that lie everywhere around us, but also because I had never had that much reason to think about them. I didn't do a great job of that here, but I like to reread this every once in a while to remember where I was then.

This piece is, now that I look at it from my current vantage point, intensely personal, and I'm not sure I should have put it online. But I did, and I think it helped me out at the time. I also got a couple messages from old friends of Alex (or David, depending on when the friend knew him). While I don't remember them being explicitly positive about this piece of writing, it had clearly helped them find a little solace in a sadness that touched us, so I think it should be up here for anyone else who needs it.

While I was at NC State, Benjamin Franklin Scholars were required to take three courses to complete the program. One of these courses was "The Ethical Dimensions of Progress," in which (at least during the spring semester of 1999), we discussed ethical dilemmas related to the concept of progress. We based our approach on several textbooks and a report from the North Carolina Progress Board. This is my final paper from the class. It's not very well researched, so treat it mostly as speculation and opinion.

Every year the Professional Engineers of North Carolina hold a student paper contest open to all students at NC State, Duke, and UNC. This is my submission to the contest in 1999. I ended up winning at the local and state levels, but as I read it again, I realize that I made some pretty serious errors in argumentation, including a nice misquoting of Turing and the use of an ambiguous reference to quantum theory. Oh well, I still stick by the thesis of the paper, so it's here as food for thought.

Matt and I worked on this paper for our project in number theory at NCSSM. We also wrote some code that is guaranteed to break a windows machine, but that is probably best left forgotten.

Here are some of the essays I wrote for my college applications in the fall of 1996. I just reread them and realized that they're pretty much all horribly self--promoting. Oh well, they're college application essays. I think they might still hold some value, even if it's only a reminder to try to stay away from them. I thought the MIT paragraph about running was pretty good, but how things have changed !

Newton's method is an algorithm for finding the roots of any differentiable single-variable equation in the imaginary plane. For many functions, the results display fractal properties. This was a project that Alex, Jesse, and I worked on for our first calculus investigation during our junior year at NCSSM. In retrospect, I'm amused and impressed by our intellectual journey here.