A Brief History
of Birne Binegar
I was born in Seattle, Washington on March 6, 1954. Since my father was an aerospace engineer,
my family moved quite a bit as I was growing up (from Seattle, WA to Ft. Walton Beach, FL to
... to Lompoc, CA to Philadelphia, PA to ... to Los Angeles, CA). I began my college career as a
Psych/Sociology Major at Temple University in Philadelphia; but I dropped out after one year
to work as a steelworker at a truck trailer manufacturing plant (union wages seemed pretty good at age 19).
After struggling for a year trying to get my car (a 1968 MG Midget) to run, I decided to drop in again
and so enrolled as a physics major at UCLA in 1974. Eight years later I graduated from
UCLA with a Ph.D. in physics, specializing in applications of representation theory to elementary
particle physics (the title of my thesis was "Covariant Field Theories on Alternative Spacetimes"). I
then progressed through a number of post-docs (R.I.M.S in Kyoto, Japan, back to UCLA, to
University of Dijon, France, to S.I.S.S.A. in Trieste, Italy, to M.S.R.I. in Berkeley) and finally landed
a tenure track position at OSU in 1988.
What do I do? Well, at first I thought of myself as a theoretical
physicist since, theoretically, I was doing physics.
But then I had to admit that I'm a physical mathematician because,
physically, I was in a mathematics department. In fact, my research interests
has always centered around understanding elementary particles as unitary
irreducible representations of a spacetime symmetry group.
In 1990, I married my wife (who else?), Yumi. We have two sons, Cosmo, born Ju>
Special Bonus MP3s
From time to time old friends google me, find this web page, and
then write me asking me if I still play guitar. Well, nothing serious
in this direction I'm afraid, but I still **** around, and the
curious can check out some recent takes transferred to mp3 format.