Life After Davis: Pricing Strategy and Crosswords

I got my Bachelors of Science in Mathematics at UC Davis in 1987. I worked as an actuary on defined benefit pension plans for about 5 years, then I worked at a management consulting firm in Menlo Park called Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) for about 5 years. At ADA we did market research, market modeling, market analysis, decision analysis, and risk analysis. I started doing pricing strategy for tech companies in Silicon Valley in 1997 and I'm still at it. I'm Vice President of Pricing for Coupa where I work remotely from my home in Burlingame, California, and when needed, I go into the office in Foster City.

In my spare time, I make crossword puzzles. It’s fun! It’s an artistic or creative outlet. My crosswords have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications, with my first published in 2010. On most weekends, one morning I go to the gym, and the other morning I construct crossword puzzles. I either build a grid, or I write the clues for a grid I have lying around that’s already built but not yet clued. For the past two years I've had a crossword in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament that is organized by New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz. 

I stay in touch with a few friends from UC Davis who were math majors. Fred Taverner is retired and lives near Discovery Bay. Allyson Angus, whose married name is Allyson Stewart, teaches math at the community college level and lives in Sebastopol.

I'd be interested in hearing about my old professors: Henry Alder, Don Chakerian, Dave Barnett, Evelyn Silvia, Tom Sallee, and David Mead.

From the Department: While many of your old professors have passed on, we did a piece about an alum Erfle who did some collaboration with Chakerian last year. David Barnett isn't active in the Department, but according to our newsletter in Winter 2002, he was updating his book about stamps, and according to Amazon he's branched out in his writing. Kurt Kreith mentions Prof. Barnett is avidly collecting stamps still. We are still working on adding some older articles about our past Department members, but here's what I've found.

Read more about Erfle and Chakerian's String Math

Read about David Barnette's interest in writing on his Amazon author page 

Memoriams

G. Thomas Sallee   David G. Mead   Evelyn M. Silvia   Henry Alder