Born in São Paulo, Brazil, son of a Romanian father (from Bucharest) and a Bulgarian Mother (from Sofia), I came to the States to study for my PhD. I studied Mathematics at the New York University, where I met my wife Carol. My first child, Ilana, was born within days of the defense of two PhD dissertations, my wife's and mine. We moved to Brazil, first to Recife and then to São Paulo, where my second child, Alexandre, was born. Eventually my wife and I decided to move back to the US. Apparently, we like to move. We initially settled in Florida, after 5 years we've moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where I currently teach. I got my Bachelor and Masters degree in Physics in Brazil. It was as an undergrad physics student that I had my first contact with computers. Fortran before Fortran 77. During my Ph.D I was again introduced to computers, this time for other reasons. VMS, Unix and eventually Solaris where the OS that I became familiar with. Computers, for me, were mostly used for communications and for word processing, since my thesis was purely theoretical. This was the Internet before browsers, just email and newsgroups. Eventually, I bought a computer, a TANDY HX-1000. 640 KB of memory, two 3.5' drives, one 5 and 1/4' "external" drive, and a 1200-baud modem. It was a mean machine. Mean to me, that is.