Erik M. Rauch

Current Address:                              Permanent Address:	
83 Duane St.                       	      40 Circle Drive
Redwood City, CA 94062-1517                   Park Ridge, NJ 07656-1103
(415) 261-0763				      (201) 573-1370
rauch@stanford.edu

Education

Yale University. B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, May 1996.

• Undergraduate Thesis: The Geometry of Critical Ising Clusters
  • Advisor: Benoit Mandelbrot

Honors

Programming Experience

Multiple years' experience including large projects in C and C++.

2 years as system administrator of an AIX network.

Parallel programming experience.

Also fluent in Lisp, Mathematica and HTML.

Experience

6/96 - 8/96

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

I worked in the theoretical physics department, continuing my undergraduate thesis work with Benoit Mandelbrot.

12/95 - 5/96

Undergraduate Thesis: The Geometry of Critical Ising Clusters with Benoit Mandelbrot.

I contributed to fundamental work on lacunarity, a property that, together with fractal dimension, describes the shape of a fractal. The work focused on fractals in the physical sciences (see publications).

5/95 - 8/95	Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory Summer Research
5/94 - 8/94	The Santa Fe Institute NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program

During these two summers, with Dr. Mark Millonas, I worked on a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems: understanding collective intelligence such as that found in insect swarms. By theoretical work and simulation, we investigated how adaptive global behavior is coordinated when agents have only limited, local knowledge. We discovered several results relating phase transitions in behavior to adaptablilty, which are described in a paper I first-authored (see "publications.")

At Los Alamos, I also worked with Dr. Ramit Mehr and a team of biologists on formulating a cellular automaton model of cell growth and repair.

10/94 - 5/95

Yale Mathematics Department Research Assistant to Benoit Mandelbrot

I aided Prof. Mandelbrot's research in fractal geometry in the physical sciences by doing extensive numerical simulations.

5/93 - 4/94

Yale Computer Science Department Summer and Term-Time Research

I designed and implemented MPGA, an object-oriented, parallel genetic algorithm. It was demonstrated by optimizing 60 floating-point variables on a problem that was hard for other optimizers. It was significantly faster than the optimizer it replaced.

Publications

Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras and Erik M. Rauch. "The geometry of Critical Ising Clusters: Gap Independence and Global Structure." Submitted to Physical Review Letters.

Presentation

Activities

Yale Scientific Magazine, Senior Editor.

In addition to serving on the governing board of this 100-year-old magazine, I was a regular contributor on topics of science policy.

Science and Math Achiever Teams (SMArT),

a volunteer science mentor program for disadvantaged middle-school students.

Writer for several other publications

including the Yale Record and the Review of Politics.

Selected Coursework

References