Mike Wills's Homepage

I recently finished my career as a graduate student in the mathematics department at University of California-Santa Barbara. I defended my PhD dissertation in May 2005. I filed my dissertation in late June 2005 and my degree was officially awarded in September 2005. My advisor was Charles A. Akemann. I joined the faculty at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington as a visiting assistant professor for one year. I am currently an assistant professor at Weber State. There are many people at UCSB who I have come to think of as friends, and there are several places at UCSB that I have fond memories of. Here is a link to photos of some of these people and some of the locations.

Sherlock Holmes: A few years ago, I took a course in graduate algebraic topology. The course number was 221B. I immediately made the connection with Sherlock Holmes, formerly of 221B Baker Street. I decided to write one of my homework problems as a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Click here to read it. Note: A. H. is the author of the textbook that we used, and Jon McCammond was our professor. They both appear indirectly in the story, as do I. The pun on rolling thunder is lifted directly from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, which you can find more about here.

While at Whitman, I received a letter from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Symbols and Punctuation. The resulting correspondence can be found here.

A Short Autobiography

In each year, a new UCSB math graduate student phone list comes out. Students can list their personal interests if they so choose. Click here to find out what interests I wrote down.

At 23:52 on 31st May 2005, Andrew Christopher Wills was born. He was 4.6 kilograms, a very big newborn. At 09:58 on 13 April 2007, Robert Gordon Wills was born. He was 'only' 4 kilograms. It is customary for the proud parent(s) to place photos of their child(ren) on their web pages, and who am I to buck this trend? The photo page is here.