Home page for an Academic Vagabond
Why "Academic Vagabond"? My friend Evelyne Hubert (at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis) laughingly bestowed this sobriquet on me when we met at Cambridge in November 2019, because of my recent travels and plans to do more. I liked it very much and have kept it, since; not so much for travel (on adventurous days I might go to my front yard these days) but because academically I get around a lot.
Why is this page here? My original home page was made when I was on sabbatical at the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics (www.cecm.sfu.ca) in 1995; my home institution at the time was the University of Western Ontario and I moved all that material to UWO in 1996. The web page was updated periodically over the decades that followed, finally being pushed to https:/publish.uwo.ca/~rcorless, on a server that turns out to be destined for obsolescent oblivion. Several helpful people have suggested that the Vagabond move to GitHub, so here I am.
The purpose of a personal web page for academics has changed over the decades. We now have semi-official preprint servers at Google Scholar, and course web pages are now served up behind paywalls at individual institutions. Videos are best delivered via YouTube channels, or maybe Vimeo. Code? Well, why not GitHub? Personal material belongs on Facebook. Opinions and rants go on blogs or vlogs, not that those are so very popular nowadays either. Academic connections are now on Twitter. So, what's left for a web page to do? I am thinking now that this page will provide links to projects and books, Maple documents and the like, and maybe some of the more obscure papers. And, some other odds and ends.
Now that I have retired from Western (I took an early retirement incentive and left there July 1, 2019 after 32 years) I am doing other things. This web page may serve some of those interests very well.