"Physicists view math in much the same way that politicians view philosophy. You use it earnestly when you can, and you twist it to suit your own purposes when you can’t."
Brian was already showing himself a math nerd in grade 10 when he sought out the math teacher in his high school and got into the calculus class.
In the last couple of years our Brian (and there are other Brian J Skinners on the web)
has given conferences at MIT, CNN sports and Harvard, two of his papers are are available at the Cornell University Library.
He's a soft-spoken and understated kind of guy.
My parents tell stories of my great grandfather, (and I also met someone who knew him in 1917.) They tell of a tall man who sounds a lot like Brian. The story was that folks would ask him a question like "how much hay do you think we'll get from this field" and that Grandpa Axel would look off into the distance for a minute and then give an answer. Now-a-days we call that mental math. I wonder if, given the same education, they might have been very alike.
"Brian J. Skinner, PhD Physics, asks when a basketball player should attempt to score early in the possession of the ball, and when the team is better off waiting for another chance.
In his own pickup basketball games, Skinner says he's always thinking whether the best player is shooting too much or whether the worst player should shoot more. "When you're a nerd, you can't turn it off." (quote from news at sciencemag dot org)
He also says:
"Holy Cow, I picked a bad time to start paying attention to politics again."
