A Brief Biographyof David Evans

David Evans was born in Sydney in 1961 and his family then moved to upstate New York, then Cambridge, England, then Griffith in NSW. When he was 11, in 1972, his parents became political staffers, so he moved to Canberra.

He attended the University of Sydney for five years from 1979 where he did science and engineering, and then spent a further five years at Stanford University at Palo Alto in California, doing a PhD in electrical engineering. Of that period as a post-graduate student in one of the most prestigious universities in the world he remarks:

I did a controversial thesis, which altered and extended some basic bits of the maths used in electrical engineering. The older professors strongly encouraged me, but many of the younger ones reacted very strongly and negatively against it, perhaps because it undermined their knowledge and thus their status. So much for science gracefully accepting and using better ideas as they arise!

After taking out his doctorate he worked for a year in Silicon Valley and then returned to Australia to write a book on the research he had done for his PhD. He had planned to spend a year or two writing, but during his writing he discovered "lots more interesting stuff and mainly did my own research until 1999". In the meantime, to support himself, he traded on the stock market and did some programming odd jobs.

In 1999, he got married but then crashed on the stock market and had to get a job. He started working as a consultant for the Australian Greenhouse Office where he wrote the software which the Australian Government uses to calculate its land-use carbon accounts for the Kyoto Protocol. Entitled FullCAM, the software models forests and agricultural systems and their exchanges of carbon with the atmosphere. It models individual plots, estates of plots, and spatial arrays of plots connected to spatial information such as rainfall, temperature, soil type, farming practices, and satellite images of clearing and revegetation.

At the same time he went back to the stock market and recovered from his crash of 1999. In 2006 he was able to leave the AGO to return to his own projects, which includes writing Geometric Fourier Analysis, a book with original mathematics that introduces a geometrical approach to Fourier analysis, improved methods in several areas of classical mathematics, and faster algorithms. He is also writing a word processor software package that handles equations, tables, and long documents properly

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