William Ellison is an aspiring insurance professional and mathematics enthusiast from Knoxville, Tennessee. His undergraduate education is in computer science (University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 2011) and he is currently preparing for his second and third bachelor’s degrees in finance and mathematics from the Thomas Edison State University. Mr. Ellison later plans on obtaining his Master of Science degree in Mathematics and his Master of Business Administration with a concentration in finance.
Why math?
Mr. Ellison cites the intellectual elegance and aesthetic joy of higher mathematics. “Math,” he says, “is an aesthetically pleasing system of abstractions that is uncannily good at explaining the real world. Sharing that aesthetic joy is my primary goal in pursuing a career as a math educator.” Mr. Ellison’s favorite areas of mathematics are analysis, calculus, probability, set theory, and analytic geometry.
Why finance?
“I never cared anything about the traditional applications of math to engineering or science,” Ellison explains. “While those applications are profoundly useful, they never really resonated with me. But when I read about the Black-Scholes equation, stochastic calculus, chaos theory, and how they converge to model risk-management models, financial markets, and many other things in the worlds of business, finance, and insurance, I was fascinated. Here was an application of mathematics to financial markets in a way that I had never seen before. Combine that with my existing interest in business, investing, economics, and risk management, and finance makes a lot of sense to pursue as a topic of interest for my second bachelor’s.”
Other interests
Among his other interests, Mr. Ellison is a keen language learner and enjoys reading about linguistics, economics, and history. His favorite historical era is the Cold War, his favorite foreign languages are Ukrainian and Mandarin Chinese, and his favorite area of linguistics are syntax and morphology. He speaks French fluently.
In his spare time, Ellison enjoys writing fiction, playing video games, and collecting music albums, math books, and video games. He is an avid Legend of Zelda fan and cites it, Doom, Final Fantasy, and Sonic the Hedgehog as his favorite game series.
Lifelong goals
Mr. Ellison lists these as his lifelong goals:
- To earn a master’s degree in mathematics
- To get a book published
- To travel to Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America
- To travel to all 50 US states
- To become fluent in at least one foreign language from three major language families (Japanese, Mandarin, and French)
- To live in a US state other than his native Tennessee
- To hike the Benton MacKaye Trail’s full length
He is sure there are others, but he could not be reached for comment when this list was prepared for publication.