Associate Dean of Natural Sciences
Professor of Mathematics
Dr. Early grew up in Austin and enjoys teaching in his hometown. His research is in combinatorics, which is a fancy word for counting, specialized in partially ordered sets (posets) and integer partitions, which yields many problems ripe for undergraduate research projects. Before coming to St. Edward's he was a high school teacher at the Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, NJ. He teaches all levels of math classes and currently serves as the Associate Dean of Natural Sciences.
Dr. Early works extensively with math competitions. He is a writer for the American Regions Math League, head coach of the Texas ARML team, former chair of the Question Writing Committee and now a National Judge for MATHCOUNTS, and was one of the founders of the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament. He enjoys practicing martial arts in his spare time and is a pum dan (half-black belt) in Pyon Moo Do.
The next time you think that somebody should do something, remember that you are somebody.
Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT
S.B. in Mathematics from MIT
Publications
Order Ideals in a Product of Chains, Australasian Journal of Combinatorics Volume 73 (3), 2019.
On the rank-unimodality of b-ary partitions (with S. Tian, A. Yang, and Y. Yuksel), Congressus Numerantium 226, 2016.
Goldbach's pigeonhole (with P. Kim and M. Proulx), The College Mathematics Journal 46 (2), 2015.
Chain lengths in the dominance lattice, Discrete Mathematics 313, 2013.
Slicing surfaces (with K. Abbott), Math Horizons, Volume 19, No. 3, 2012.
Chain lengths in the Tamari lattice, Annals of Combinatorics, Volume 8, No. 1, 2004.
Presentations
What's your problem? Here are some of my favorites, MathFest, Tampa, FL, August 2023
Decent Polynomials, MathFest, Chicago, IL, July 2017.
Guessing your way through a probability test, AMS/MAA Joint Meetings, Seattle, WA, January 2016.
My Favorite Bijections, Discrete Math Seminar, Texas State University, San Marcos, October 2015.
Character Polynomials, Stanley@70, Cambridge, MA, June 2014.
To Infinity Times Infinity and Beyond, Mathworks Colloquium, Texas State University, San Marcos, June 2013.
Character Polynomials, CombinaTexas, Southwestern University, Georgetown, April 2012.
Discrete Dynamical Fibonacci, AMS/MAA Joint Meetings, Boston, MA, January 2012.
Slicing Surfaces, Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America, UT-Tyler, April 2011.
Chain Lengths in the Dominance Lattice, 15th International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics, Vadstena, Sweden, June 2003.