Homer White

About Me

I'm a mathematics professor at a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, retraining to serve as the Computer Science instructor for my Department. My PhD thesis—completed in 1991 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—dealt with ergodic theory, which is the study of the long-term average behavior of dynamical systems that can be quite unpredictable in the short-run. You can think of it as an extreme generalization of probability theory in mathematics, or of thermodynamics in physics.

Over the years I have become increasingly involved in statistics and the design of software for statistics education. I work with the R statistical programming language and the Shiny web-app framework for R, and have authored several contributed R packages that are currently used in teaching.

Outside of my professorial roles I work in grass-roots social-justice organizing, meditate with a small Zen Buddhist community, practice Ashtanga Yoga and enjoy Sanskrit philology. I am married, with three mostly-grown children.