Mark Galassi

email: mark_web@galassi.org

Biographical Sketch

Mark Galassi was born in Manhattan, January 8 1965. He grew up in France (ages 1-6) and Italy (ages 6-18). He studied classics at the Liceo Classico Parini in Milan.

He returned to the United States in 1983 to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he got his BA in physics (December 1986).

In September 1987 he moved to Long Island to study in the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook under Martin Rocek.

He finished his PhD in September 1992 with a thesis in General Relativity and Regge Calculus. (See my Dissertation.)

After Stony Brook he moved to Santa Fe in 1992, New Mexico, to work in the Theoretical Astrophysics group in Los Alamos National Laboratory.

He still lives in Santa Fe, raises his three wonderful children, and works in Los Alamos. Since 1993 Mark has been in the Space Science and Technology division (renamed various times; now it's called ISR division, but nobody knows what that actually stands for). Mark has happily worked on research in astrophysics, non-proliferation, radiography, space physics, computer science, ionospheric physics...

In the spring of 1997 he took a partial sabbatical from Los Alamos and worked for Cygnus (now merged with Red Hat) writing software and books for eCos. He returned to full time work in Los Alamos to work on the HETE-2 satellite

Research and Software Development

Here is a partial list of the projects I have worked on:

The GNU Guile interpreter
The GNU Scientific Library (GSL)
HETE-2 satellite
Genie
The Swift satellite
Based on suggestions from Ian Taylor and Jason Molenda, I promoted, packaged, and participated in the development of the Docbook tools.
The Raptor telescope and software pipeline
Muon Tomography
Three-dimensional imaging of hidden objects using positron emission backscatter
The Los Alamos lightning detection network
The Hurricane Lightning project
Standoff Radiation Detection System (SORDS)
The Integrated Standoff Inspection System (ISIS)
Space weather and the DREAM project

He also sits on the board of directors of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

A strong advocate of free software, Mark spends some of his spare time hacking on free software for the GNU project.

Writing, editing, conferences

I like to write papers and other documents on the topics I research, the software I write, and things I learn. Here is a pointer to documentation I have written. At this point these links are getting a bit old and stale.

Brian Gough has an excellent publishing company called Network Theory Ltd. which publishes free software manuals. Ht has published the The GNU Scientific Library book. Brian does me the kindness of having me and James Theiler as first authors on the book because we started the project, even though at this point we are far from being majority authors.

In 2003 Ed Fenimore and I organized the Gamma Ray-Burst conference. We also edited and published the Gamma-Ray Bursts: 30 Years of Discovery prceedings book.

In 2007 David Palmer, Ed Fenimore and I organized the Gamma Ray-Burst conference. We also edited and published the Gamma-Ray Bursts 2007 prceedings book.

Other computing and science interests

(links here might be broken; this is mostly an old section)

I have been interested in Cellular Automata for a while, in the areas of both Regge Calculus and adaptive computation (see next entry).
In the Winter of 1994/1995 I started working in my spare time on using Genetic Algorithms to evolve Cellular Automata to do useful computation. This is related to work being done by Melanie Mitchell and others on evolving CAs to do useful tasks (EVCA). My interest in applying these techniques to more real-world problems eventually flowed into the Genie project.
Dominion , the dominion distribution is here (but for now it's easier to get it here).
I have been doing UNIX system administration since 1984, and I treat it as an art. I still do it recreationally, although it is not part of my job right now.
I have been using the scheme programming language for a while now, especially guile, the GNU Extension language which is based on scheme. There are nice WWW servers at MIT, and Indiana.
Nelson Minar has put together a list of true hacking projects. I find most of them quite interesting. (at this point the list is quite old)
I tend to be interested in almost any scientific project, and enjoy collaborating with people in very different areas from physics. I have concluded that I am more driven by the day-to-day detailed work of scientific research than by a specific career-long project.

Other (non-technical) interests

Music (I play folk music on the guitar and sometimes play gigs), martial arts (I train in and teach Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido in Santa Fe), woodworking, hiking, reading, ...

Contact info

email: mark_web@galassi.org

here is my GPG public key info for mark at galassi.org:


fingerprint is:

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uid                  Mark Galassi 
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Last modified: Mon Feb 5 02:04:36 MST 2007