William Ellison is an aspiring mathematics educator and keen amateur mathematician from Knoxville, Tennessee. His undergraduate education is in computer science (University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 2011) and he is currently preparing for the first of two master’s degrees he plans on pursuing, in particular the Master of Science in Financial Engineering (MScFE) from WorldQuant University. Mr. Ellison plans on obtaining his Master of Science degree in Mathematics from Emporia State University (Olathe, KS) starting in 2027 or 2028.
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 financial engineering?
“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.”
Why teaching?
“I have always loved to teach and train,” Ellison explains. “In my current day job, I get to train as a small yet significant portion of my duties and it is easily my favorite aspect of the work. Watching someone absorb what I am teaching, watching their understanding increase in real time, is its own reward. Medical billing, like mathematics, is a tricky subject to teach because a lot of it is quite abstract. It may not seem that way at first blush, but there is a lot to take in and most of it is quite disconnected from reality even though it relates to real-world phenomena. Wherever I have worked or studied, people have sought me out to help them learn. That has motivated me to do it for a living.”
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 work as a mathematics educator
- To become fluent in at least one foreign language from six major language families (most likely candidates: Romance (French), Japonic (Japanese), Slavic (Ukrainian), Sinitic (Mandarin), Bantu (Swahili), and Polynesian (Hawaiian))
- 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.