All About Adam

Who are your people?

Recently, I read a interesting story on what we do with introductions. Nowadays, the rage is "What do you do?" or my homage to His Girl Friday, "What's your angle?" But in the South, the old rage at least was "Who are your people?" So I think I'll start the old way.

On my father's side, the surname Molnar is Hungarian, from a family who arrived here about 100 years ago. A lot of this branch settled in Pittsburgh, so many in fact that a street was named after them, Molnar Drive. Well, that's where a bunch lived, but there's a school at the end of the street now, Hance Elementary. The Hungarians intermarried here, leading to polyglot nationality. Somewhere, my parents, or my dad's parents, have a list of descendants, but I don't.

On my mother's side, my grandmother was a Hispanic from Texas, possibly Cherokee, who wound up in Pennsylvania and married my grandfather. So the federal government, thanks to all those wonderful Southerners and their intermarriage laws, considers me Hispanic. Note in the family picture below the rounder Hispanic face of my mom. My mom and dad met at college, married right after, and moved to near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where my dad had found a teaching job. He retired in June 2005, after 35 years with the same school district. After my brother and I became a few years old, my mom acquired a position at another local school, and has been there for about 23 years. They both teach mathematics. A picture of my family is below; my brother Ray is bottom left and I'm bottom right.

The Life of Adam

I came into this world about 11 AM on January 21, 1975, never one to really like early morning anyway. I was raised for the first 2 years in a trailer, since one teacher's salary was pitiful in those days, until my parents bought a house near Salix, Pennsylvania. So yes, I am trailer trash, and I received a lunch subsidy in school for a couple years (although I can't remember government cheese). I attended Forest Hills High School, well known at the time for being in the bottom 20 districts in per capita wealth in Pennsylvania. For more on my hometown area, you can pick up the classic poverty text The Other America, ISBN 068482678X, and note that my hometown is next to St. Michael. It never got better, and the 1980s were not times of plenty there. I've described it as such an economically depressed area that optimists didn't exist, especially among the children of my age. (I can't think of any.)

A combination of natural gifts, parental support, and luck landed me a marvellous score on the PSAT exam in 1990, and so I got deluded by lots of mail for colleges. (Apparently, poor rural Appalachian is an underrepresented group at top schools.) Having arranged for a full scholarship at the fine school Alfred University, I decided to fill out one application to an Ivy League school. And so I did; my parents and guidance counselor were polite enough not to express their doubts in front of me.

After graduating high school, I attended Harvard University and graduated with High Honors in Applied Mathematics. Yes, I do have proof. Yes, it surprised me too. I then took a position consulting with American Management Systems, and worked there for four years. (AMS was recently bought by a Canadian firm, so the link takes you to the new firm's place.) I went to the University of Chicago for graduate school. Recently, I moved to Louisville to start work as a professor at Bellarmine University.

Questions and Answers

Answers to the queries above

• What does your voice sound like? A tenor, almost a contratenor, with a great deal of nasal intonation. And less than an octave and a half of range, not good at all.
• What games do you like best? Right now, trading card games, ultimate frisbee, and volleyball. See my Hobbies pages.
• Do you collect butterflies? No, I live in the city.
• How old are you? Thirty-two years.
• How many brothers do you have? Just one sibling, Ray, three years younger, who earned a bachelor's and master's degree from the second best school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's married.
• How much do you weigh? Right now, about 90 kilograms pounds on a 1.84 meter frame. I've been pretty stable for the past year. There's too much fatty food in Louisville.
• How much money does your father make? He's a schoolteacher in America; remember the trailer from above? Not so much.

Answers to some other interrogations

• Are you married? No. I am single and unattached. I even have a dating page on the subject. Being a hopeless romantic doesn't make it easy.
• Are you really a cynic? Not anymore. I used to be extremely cynical. It was a relatively simple defense mechanism to a 14 year old who couldn't understand why people do evil things. This started me on my power studies, by the way. As I grew older, I became better able to deflect or ignore bad acts against me, and begin to see positive examples and good people, so my need for cynicism diminished. I often describe cynics as "inherently sweet people who have been hurt too often," and I think it's true. The cynics I know are generally savagely nice when you've shown you're not evil and out to hurt them.
• So then, what is your personality? "Innocence lost" might be best. I try to support the relatively few inherently kind and unsullied people I meet. I once was sweet, then lost the way. There are few enough good people around; they can use the help.
• You spoke about good and evil. Are you religious? Why, yes I am. The best short description would be evangelical-friendly progressive Catholic, but I've written more about that elsewhere, especially the faith page.
• So then, what's your favorite Bible quote, Mr. Faith Boy? Isaiah 61:1-3. (Also read by Jesus in Luke 4. Here, I'm using a direct translation from the Conclave Mass, which has a nice poetry.) The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted; to proclaim freedom for captives and release from darkness for prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair.
• What sort of cultural activities do you enjoy? See my hobbies page for links to the books, TV, music, and movies that I like. Yes, I do watch television that's not PBS, and I have been known to listen to Top 40 music. But I did make monetary contributions to NPR twice, so does that save my yuppie credentials?
• Blossom, Bubbles, or Buttercup? Bubbles, definitely.


• Besides statistics, what do you care about? A few things. I've written a decent amount on faith. I've written some on power, including submission and high pressure religious groups. I've also written some on romanticism, not just a literary theory.
• Do you have a blog? Yes, called Mathematics After the Fall. It's a play on a definition of Statistics and theology. Most of the postings are about thoughts, not the typical blog fare.

It'd be nice to have a cool signature here, some short summary. I'm not that sharp. Instead, I change my email signature from time to time, and the list as a whole summarizes me. I put up the full list and explanations on this page.

Last updated: November 2007. I'm not particularly exact about time normally, so why start now?