A first?

I heard congressman-elect Jerry McNerney on Air America radio the other day, and host David Bender stated that the US has elected its first Mathematics PhD congressman. (Boehlert and Ehlers have physics degrees). McNerney has used his math education to good effect, running a wind energy company recently. Out of curiosity, I looked up his Phd Thesis at University of New Mexico, A (1,1) tensor generalization of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. A somewhat obscure topic, but it appears to have at least some applicability to 3D medical imaging.

But above all, we have begun to rid ourselves of the dread Pombo affliction. Mathematically eliminated but still squirming, he can still do some damage evidently.

Maybe he (Pombo) will also try to get Arctic drilling and some of his other bills through, in a last-minute, "Hail Mary" assault on the environment.