Charlie Eppes - Backstory

Backstory

According to Eppes' father, he could multiply four-digit numbers mentally at age three and at the age of four required special teachers. In the second grade, he attempted to find a 70-digit narcissistic number in base 12 — Eppes has described himself as "quixotic" in elementary school. A prodigy, he attended Princeton University at the age of 13 after graduating from high school at the same time as his brother who is five years his senior ("Soft Target"), and took Professor Lawrence Fleinhardt's quantum physics course in his first year. They became fast friends, with Fleinhardt establishing his academic connections. Eppes published his first mathematical treatise at the age of 14 (in the American Journal of Mathematics) and graduated at the age of 16. In fact, he was the youngest person to ever write a paper of importance.

It was his paper on the Eppes convergence, which concerned asymptotics of Hermetian random matrices, that made him a star in his field. Following a seminar that heavily criticized this seminal piece many years after its initial publication, Charlie realized that his work with the FBI has prevented him from doing research significant to other mathematicians and now hopes to spend decades on cognitive emergence theory ("the mathematics of the brain") to rectify this certain inequity, which has delighted Fleinhardt. Although he was a child prodigy, Charlie now laments the fact that his best years in his research will never come ahead of schedule again.

Eppes is a multiple Ph.D. ("Decoy Effect"), a recipient of the Milton Prize and a nominee for the Fields Medal. Following his five-year research on random matrices, Charlie worked on sequences with orthogonal symmetry. He has also provided insights for possibly solving the P vs. NP problem and published works on H-infinity control of nonlinear systems and computational fluid dynamics, while his current research is in cognitive emergence theory. He has presented seminars on harmonic analysis and the zeros of random orthogonal polynomials and given lectures on group theory and Kac–Moody algebras. Eppes has taught courses on calculus, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, game theory and probability at CalSci in addition to giving guest lectures on applied probability. The lecture in which he converted the classroom into a miniature casino for analyzing probabilities is considered an "Eppes Classic". Also, Eppes has taken over Fleinhardt's computational physics class when he was asked to do so, and has given a joint lecture on circular motion and the Coriolis effect with Fleinhardt. Professor Otto Bahnoff took over Eppes' mathematical physics grad seminar on the day he got married.