• Creating Dynamic Web Docs
  • Discrete Mathematics
    • Other Courses: Professional Interests: I did my graduate and post-doctoral work in Harmonic Analysis and the Interplay between Harmonic Analysis and Probability.
    Peter Ohring
    Since coming to Purchase I have also become interested in applications of Harmonic Analysis in the area of Digital Image Processing, in particular to the problem of Image Compression.

    My interest in Computer Science goes back to the early '60 when I would help my father haul cartons of punch cards to the local Control Data (The Sun Microsystems of it's day) computer center on Saturday mornings. In those days using a computer meant renting time on a mainframe that usually took up an entire room.

    Keyboards replaced punch cards midway through my undergraduate days in the 70's and I ended up with a minor in computer science. I think I did this more as a back-up strategy
    with students from New Media summer camp
    with New Media summer campers
    than anything else as at the time I was enamored by pure mathematics. I worked as a scientific programmer to help pay my way through graduate school in mathematics (Harmonic Analysis) in the early 80's but never found it very rewarding.

    My present fascination with the technology traces back to the late 80's when fellow mathematicians began finding new applications of Harmonic Analysis to solve problems in image processing. In fact the new (2000) jpeg image format is an outgrowth of these developments. This fascination was enhanced by two seminal developments in our society, the ascendance of the personal computer in the 80's and the breathtaking growth of the world wide web and the Internet in the 90's. (I was a sporadic user of email in the 80's - it wasn't until the early 90's that there was a critical mass of online users and we began to realize the great benefits of this Internet protocol.)

    Rachel and Isaac
    Rachel and Isaac
    Other Interests: I took up fiddle playing a few years ago to put into practice my love for traditional music forms. Lately I've been playing mostly Celtic and Klezmer music. Other interests include gardening ( CLICK HERE for a picture of my garden), bicycling, tennis and racquetball. My two beautiful children, Isaac and Rachel( Rachel: The First Year and 2002 in Pictures), are a constant source of joy and entertainment.

    New Media

    Math/CS


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