Jeff Erickson's Family

• My beautiful wife Kim Whittlesey is a geometric group theorist. Kim finished her Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley in 1998 under John Stallings. Kim is a lecturer in the UIUC math department.

  

• Fifteen-year-old Damien is an artist, poet, and storyteller who dearly loves her parents but thinks we're kind of idiots. Despite the inevitable ravages of adolescence, Damien is kind and insightful and unstoppably creative, and sometimes infinitely wiser than either Kim or me.

  

• Eleven-year-old Hannah is a sunny little engineer who likes math and puzzles and climbing and singing, and who has by far the most active social life of any of us. When she gets older, we'll have to hide the screwdrivers and the soldering iron for a while. Or not.

  

• My mom Connie Erickson paints and draws portraits for a living. Check out her online portfolio and her blog. Mom recently moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, because ain't nobody buying portraits in Urbana.

  

• My dad Jon Erickson is a retired medical physicist who ran his own consulting company for many years. Dad used to be a professor of radiology, which mostly inoculated me against both academic and hospital politics. His master's advisor was a student of Robert Oppenheimer.

  Dad used to keep an electric hammer in his office. It looked just like a regular claw hammer, but it had a brass plate with a toggle switch and a red LED on the end of the handle. When anyone asked how it worked, Dad would flip the toggle switch, the LED would light up, and he'd say “There, now it's on.” People say this story explains a lot about me.

  

• My sister Tina Erickson is a photographer, biker, retronaut, and even more of a coffee snob than me. Her husband Don Bernier makes documentaries; you might have seen his Emmy-nominated editing work on PBS. Tina frequently accuses me of breaking things, which would bother me a lot more if it weren't true.

• Coco is a black Lab (mix?) puppy who we adopted in February 2016. She would like to go on a walk right now, please, unless you would like to throw this ball, or you have a pizza you'd like to accidentally drop on the ground.

• Nori was a Lab/Shepherd/Husky/Akita/something-or-other mix who died in 2013, after living with Kim and me for almost 12 years, including Kay and Hannah's entire lives. We all miss him!

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- "Zits" (3/30/98) by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman