Professor (emeritus), Department of Mathematics,
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 03755
Phone: (603) 646-2866 Fax: (603) 646-1312
Email john.lamperti@dartmouth.edu

 This page describes some of the themes of my adult life and work. First, here is a professional résumé giving my degrees and positions I've held. The second page lists some of my technical publications which in retrospect seem to have been most worthwhile, along with short descriptions of what they are about. If you'd rather go directly to the publications page click

Along with mathematics, I have spent a lot of time in recent years on political and social work. The long-range goals, as I see them, are peace, political and social justice, and defending the marvelous natural world in which we find ourselves. Page 2 of the resume also lists some of my non-technical publications.

One can hardly think about peace and justice without facing the dangers of nuclear weapons. A short essay on this issue is while a critique of the Bush administration's doctrine of "preemption" is

Much more recently I read Sherwin and Bird's monumental biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and that inspired me to write down some thoughts about the origins of the nuclear age. That essay is as well as on the web site of "TruthOut."

One area where social concerns intersect with math and statistics is investigating whether capital punishment in the United States prevents murders through "deterrence." I first became interested in this problem when the death-penalty issue arose in Vermont back around 1975. It was a hot topic in New Hampshire in 1998, in 2000, and again in 2009/10, while for the nation as a whole the log jam around this issue may be breaking at last. Here is a paper summarizing the evidence about deterrence. I originally prepared testimony for the Vermont Legislature several decades ago, and this version has been updated and presented in NH in 2010.

Another important area for applied statistics is checking the results and accuracy of elections. I wrote an article jointly with my friend Arlene Ash (see the last section of this site) about one election where vote counting went disasterously wrong; our paper appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Chance magazine, published by the American Statistical Association. You can read it online; go here and then click on the title of our article. (But in the magazine itself we were featured on the cover!)

More recently, Arlene and I studied the wave of new laws and rules making it harder to vote that were created in over 30 states. She gave a talk about this at the annual meeting of the A.S.A., and we wrote a joint paper on the subject for the journal Statistics, Politics and Policy. That's not the mass media, so we tried to reach more people before the 2012 elections with a shorter version that appeared in TruthOut.


Since 1985 one of my main interests and concerns has been Central America and what the United States was doing there. People at the American Friends Service Committee asked me to study the inroads of Communism and the USSR in the region and the dangers, if any, which they posed to this country. One result was a short book published in 1988 analyzing those alleged threats and comparing the reality and rhetoric of U.S. policy. I also spent time in Costa Rica and wrote about the U.S. impact on that beautiful country.

For nearly a decade my main project was to study the life of Enrique Alvarez Córdova, a remarkable man from El Salvador who gave his life for the people of his country. A short article about Enrique is in this section, along with two photos, a chronology and some appreciative quotes from Salvadoran writers.


My full length biography of Enrique Alvarez was published by McFarland in April 2006, and a flyer with a picture of the book is on the publisher's website here; a review of the book by Prof. Jack Spence is here, and an article by a Salvadoran reader (in Spanish) is here. The book has been translated and I hope it will be widely read in El Salvador, since one of its purposes is to help the Salvadoran people remember and appreciate one of their country's heroes. That actually seems to be happening, thanks in part to the election of Mauricio Funes as the country's president. In November 2009 the national agricultural research institute was officially renamed "CENTA -- Enrique Alvarez Córdova"!

My El Salvador pages also include a few non-fiction "short stories"; perhaps the most intriguing of these is about the mysterious don Justo Armas who may, or may not, have had some surprising family connections. Finally, please note the (recently revised) story of El Salvador's Holocaust heroes, recalling a glorious moment in the nation's history.

I would be happy to correspond with anyone about Enrique Alvarez or anything else related to El Salvador.

 

Of course life is also about wonderful people. These pages introduce some of the significant others who have helped me stay (largely) sane and happy, and who help make it all worth while. My love and gratitude go to the friends and family whose photos are here and also to those not pictured on this site. New on this site in 2005: a pair of small twins, plus my daughter Noelle and her husband Robert Bushell. Even newer are my two grandsons, born to Noelle and Robert in 2007 and 2009. go there And don't overlook the two short (and true) "stories" at the bottom of the page.

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Last Updated: March 10, 2013. Many thanks to Sergey Demidenko for help originally setting up these pages.