About Myself

Hi, I'm Ravi Montenegro. I was born in Pasadena, California. As a preschooler I moved to Minnesota, but a couple of years later moved back to California. I attended elementary and middle school in Mendocino, California, a small town of about 1000 people, north of San Fransisco. Near the end of my eighth grade year my family moved to the greater Los Angeles area where I attended high school at El Dorado High School and Troy High School, both in Orange County, California. Next, in 1992, I began college as a Physics student at the California Institute of Technology. It did not take me long to realize that Mathematics is a superior field to Physics and so I soon changed my field of study. After graduating from Caltech in June 1995 I moved on to graduate school in Mathematics at Yale University. The next summer I went to Germany for two months and studied German at the Goethe Institute in Prien am Chiemsee, after which I succeded in passing the math department German language exam at Yale. After finishing my second year at Yale in April 1997 I took a leave of absence and studied Japanese in Japan for a year. I submitted my PhD Dissertation in the summer of 2002 and received my doctoral degree in December, 2002. This was followed by three years as a Postoctoral researcher at the GeorgiaTech Math Department, and subsequently in September 2005 I began a position as an Assistant Professor in the UMass Lowell Math Department.

My Interests and Hobbies

• Learning about other cultures
  
• The Great Outdoors: Hiking and currently learning snowboarding
  
• Reading Science Fiction and Fantasy
  
• Studying languages: German (which I have completely forgotten) and Japanese (which I am still fairly good at)

• Favorite Author : Clifford Simak (especially City).
• Favorite SciFi Author(s) : C.S. Friedman (especially The Madness Season) and David Wingrove (the Chung Kuo series).
• Favorite Fantasy Author(s) : J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and George R.R. Martin (the Song of Fire and Ice series).
• Favorite movies: Gattaca, Tsotsi, Wag the Dog.