Timothy Morris

X
ME

timothy.morris@csus.edu
  • Bachelors in Physics
  • Ph.D. in Mathematics

Growing Up

I was born in the small town of Delavan1 in the center of Illinois. However, my earliest memories are not of the USA, but of life in Zambia2. When I was two years old my parents took our family to Zambia where my Dad was a missionary3. As the youngest of six boys growing up in Zambia4, I learned to fend for myself. As an example, I would visit the older women from Canada that lived next door to get goodies. When my mother found out what I was doing she told me I could not ask for treats, but that didn't stop me. The next time I visited I simply asked the question "How come there are three cookies and only two of you?"

The mission station we lived on had a generator for the hospital. The generator ran for three hours a day and everyone charged truck batteries for light for the rest of the day. The nearest paved road, with the exception of a single bridge, was a full day's drive away in Lusaka5. The drinking water supply was not safe and had to be either filtered or boiled, and to get hot water we had a wood-burning hot water heater made out of a 55 gallon drum.

When I was six years old, my parents decided to move back to Delavan, IL. On arrival back in the states, I was amazed at all the technological marvels I saw for the first time in my memory. Such marvels as an ice maker in the freezer, a dishwasher, and garage door openers. Thus, I went through, what I would term, technology shock more than culture shock.

This technology shock did for me what I think it would do for just about anyone. I had come from a society where, for the most part, I could understand how things worked, to a society full of wonder and mystery. How is it possible that pushing a button in a car would open a garage door? How could a machine pipe water into a freezer to form ice without freezing the pipes? I did not have a hope of understanding at the time. However, it went further than that. My father, shortly after we got back to the U.S., bought a computer for use in his office. I was allowed to use it a small amount, and was astounded by the fact that I could control the screen. What astounded me even more, though, was the fact that some of my older brothers could write computer games. So, I went in the course of less than a year from living with almost no technology, to being one of the most technologically advanced families in the area.

This drove my curiosity about the physical world. As I asked my parents and older sibling how things worked, they would answer by discussing physics and then applying it to the situation at hand. So, I associated the study of physics with understanding how things worked. My family not only pushed my curiosity in this way, however, they also discussed mathematical concepts that were significantly past my level of education. I can remember one of my brothers, as he was learning about multiplying negative numbers, arguing that a negative times a negative could not be a positive. Of course, everyone else disagreed with him, so I had to take sides. In order to take sides, though, I had to know what a negative number was. So I learned about negative numbers in second grade.

My interests, however, remained in the physical sciences and I eventually got my BS in Physics6. I went ahead and picked up a minor in math, because it only required two extra classes. One of those classes turned out to be Graph Theory, and I was hooked. I had never before seen any math that used proofs in quite the way graph theory did. They were so simple, and yet showed such counter-intuitive facts. Even though I was hooked, I was also tired of school, so I finished my bachelors and left school for the job market.

Adult Life