A Brief History
of Birne Binegar
I was born in Seattle, Washington on March 6, 1954. Since my father was an aerospace engineer,
my family moved quite a bit as I was growing up (from Seattle, WA to Ft. Walton Beach, FL to
... to Lompoc, CA to Philadelphia, PA to ... to Los Angeles, CA). I began my college career as a
Psych/Sociology Major at Temple University in Philadelphia; but I dropped out after one year
to work as a steelworker at a truck trailer manufacturing plant (union wages seemed pretty good at age 19).
After struggling for a year trying to get my car (a 1968 MG Midget) to run, I decided to drop in again
and so enrolled as a physics major at UCLA in 1974. Eight years later I graduated from
UCLA with a Ph.D. in physics, specializing in applications of representation theory to elementary
particle physics (the title of my thesis was "Covariant Field Theories on Alternative Spacetimes"). I
then progressed through a number of post-docs (R.I.M.S in Kyoto, Japan, back to UCLA, to
University of Dijon, France, to S.I.S.S.A. in Trieste, Italy, to M.S.R.I. in Berkeley) and finally landed
a position in the mathematics department at OSU in 1988.
What do I do? Well, at first I thought of myself as a theoretical
physicist since, theoretically, I was doing physics.
But then I had to admit that I'm a physical mathematician because,
physically, I was in a mathematics department. In fact, my research interests
has always centered around understanding elementary particles as unitary
irreducible representations of a spacetime symmetry group.
In 1990, I married my wife (who else?), Yumi. We have two sons, Cosmo, born June 22, 1994 and Skye, born July 14, 1996.
Special Bonus MP3s
From time to time old friends google, find this web page, and
then write me asking me if I still play guitar. Well, nothing serious
in that direction I'm afraid, but I still **** around, and the
curious can check out some recent takes transferred to mp3 format.