Imagine two concentric circles; the inner circle
is Mathematics; the surrounding annulus has three equal partitions:
Technology, Education, and Music. This
is my creative Workspace, first encountered as a child holding the hand of
my father, Hussein Mohammed Ameen, for whom, navigating the war wracked
North Atlantic, spherical trigonometry was a matter of life and death, and
the violin music of a shipmate was a thread of hope.
BHSS energized my Workspace, inspiring me with a
lifelong enthusiasm for learning, a first-hand engagement with mathematical
inquiry, a hands-on connection with technology, and an immersion in the
ancient pas-de-deux of music and mathematics. It was here that I began a
continuing interest in mathematical theories of information, and received a
Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Group Award in 1963. My decades of
involvement with alternative and gifted education were inspired by Dr. I. A.
Dodes, a courageous visionary, and my abiding respect for human potentiality
and talent was inspired by my truly remarkable BHSS classmates.
Through the past 40 years I have explored the dynamics
of my Workspace, learning by doing, traversing, by turns, directed and
stochastic paths. Course work in music, mathematics, and education,
primarily at CCNY, was valuable as much for its content as for the restless
discontent with which I responded. I received the CCNY Music Department
"Greenberg Award" in 1967, and thereafter participated as a violinist in
NYC's avant-garde jazz circle.
Since 1973 I have developed and taught challenging
mathematics and music curricula at alternative/gifted schools, including
City-As-School, Creative Music Studio, Hudson School for the Gifted, and
most recently at MSU Academic Gateways (K-8): "Computer Chips and Violin
Strings", and "Classical and Quantum Information and Computing for Kids."
From 1978-1981 I was violinist with jazz innovator
Cecil Taylor, participating in a series of landmark recordings, tours of the
USA and Europe, the Newport Jazz Festival at Carnegie Hall, and was a Down
Beat Critics Poll Award winner.
In 1983, newly married, I received a BA in Mathematics
from Excelsior College/SUNY and began an information technology career,
which included founding, in 1988, my home-based consulting business,
Resolution Corp. My wife, Mary D. Ameen, and I have two children, Alexander,
b.1988, and Amber, b.1991. The most important work of my life has been to
walk the path of discovery hand-in-hand with my family, as we navigate the
oceans of our creative Workspace.
