George Heine

Accomplishments

2000

Built an astrolabe.

1999

Spent six weeks in Paris and the Netherlands gathering research material on the history of mathematics.

1999

Spent a week touring Santiago, Rabida, Genovesa, North Seymour, and other islands in the Galapagos.

1998

For a major vendor of scientific software, designed and implemented code to import ArcView shapefiles for statistical analysis.

1997

Implemented, in C++, a new algorithm using optimization techniques to resolve the overlapping boundaries resulting from polygon overlay.

Hacked together a home LAN consisting of a Pentium/Linux, a 386/Linux, a 486/Win3.1, a Pentium/Win95, lots of cat-5 cable, and odds and ends of software.

Trying to track down obscure bugs in RPC calls buried deep within BLM's new spatial analysis software. Also figuring out how to get Windows NT to think it's Unix.

Studying martial arts, learning both Arabic and Chinese and trying to keep them straight.

1996

Legal Land Description in ArcInfo: Wrote an Arc Macro Language (AML) procedure which accepts as input an Arc coverage representing the Public Land Survey and edits it, following standard surveying rules, to produce new polygons representing the aliquot parts of sections. This program promises to allow the BLM to provide graphic displays and faster service for mining claims, land transfers, and title searches.

Travelled to Braga, Portugal, to present (in three languages) a paper on medieval Islamic mathematics to the quadrennial Congress on the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics.

1995

Created a set of programs to query existing map metadata and rewrite in standard form, saving tens of thousands of work hours.

1994

Submitted Ph.D. dissertation (Title: "Smart Simulated Annealing"), and graduated from the University of Colorado.

Spent three weeks in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico, trying to get really GOOD at speaking Spanish. Learned how to nurse a Corona, and that Moctezuma is still taking his revenge.

1989--1992

Designed and wrote the analysis component, incorporating Arc/Node/Ring topology, for a new GIS system able to perform complex operations such as overlay and buffer.

1988

Wrote a digitizer registration algorithm that accepts as input four or more user-selected control points and the parameters of any common map projection, and computes the root mean square best approximation to the physical map position.

1986

Implemented two distinct algorithms for interpolating a three- dimensional surface from sparse and irregularly scattered data points. My work on these algorithms is cited in Environmental Systems Research Institute's Arc/Info user documentation.

1984

When personal computers were still a novelty, I designed and installed custom accounting software for a small business. Programs included a sales journal with random and sequential access, and a customer data base which could print invoices and mailing labels in a user-specialized format.