I was born in 1955 in Kansas City, Missouri and attended Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas. I earned my B.A. in mathematics in 1977 at Princeton University and my Ph.D. in 1980 at University of California at Berkeley . My undergraduate thesis, "Affine manifolds and projective geometry on manifolds," was directed by William Thurston (and Dennis Sullivan, who visited Princeton in the Fall of 1976.) That was when I became interested in geometric structures on manifolds; My doctoral dissertation, "Discontinuous groups and the Euler class," was directed by Moe Hirsch. I continued to work with Sullivan and Thurston on an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado in 1988-1981. After that I held several junior positions (C.L.E. Moore Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor) at M.I.T. In the Fall of 1983 I visited the University of Maryland to participate in their "Special year in Geometry." I spent the academic year 1984--1985 at M.S.R.I. I currently work in the Mathematics Department of the University of Maryland , where I have been since 1986. The Spring of 1990 I spent at Oxford University and I.H.E.S. I held a position at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies for five years. I served on the Board of Governors of the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota from 1994-1996. From June 1995 to May 1998 I served as Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Mathematics Department of the University of Maryland and from June 2001 to May 2003 I chaired the Department's Geometry/Topology Field Committee.
I am married to Emily Ann Morris Goldman and we have three children, Evan, currently a student at the New York Academy of Art, (see his depiction of Terrapin Geometers on my home page), Lizzie, and Michael, who are both students at the University of Maryland.