Michael E. Stillman received his PhD in Mathematics from Harvard in 1983, taught at University of Chicago 1983-85, was at Brandeis and then MIT 1985-87, and then came to Cornell University. His mathematical research concerns computational algebraic geometry and algebraic geometry. He started writing syzygy programs as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, and from 1983 to 1992 with Dave Bayer he wrote Macaulay, a specialized computer algebra system for algebraic geometry and the predecessor of this program.