About me (so far)

I was born in the town of Aiken, South Carolina in 1997. My parents, Drew Bliss and Tina Dougherty, were born in Michigan and New Jersey, respectively. The Dougherty family came to the United States in the mid 1800’s from Ireland. The ‘Dough’ of Dougherty is pronounced like ‘Loch’ in ‘Loch Ness Monster’, or you can think ‘dock-er-tee’. The Bliss family has been in America for a long time.

I moved to Lugoff, South Carolina as a small kid and bounced between there and Elgin until I graduated high school. I mostly studied computer repair and programming in school, but eventually focused on math thanks to my teaching-hero, David Caldwell.

I graduated from Oglethorpe University, a tiny liberal arts college in Atlanta, in 2019. Other than all the math I learned, I heard a lot of exciting lectures on history, philosophy, art, and much more. I wish math had more chances to talk about life’s Big Questions. (Oh well, back to teaching calculus!)

I received my PhD in 2024 under Doron Zeilberger at Rutgers University. I first learned about Zeilberger by reading a copy of his book A = B I found in the basement of Oglethorpe’s library. As far as I know I was the only person to ever check this book out, so that might be the most influential copy ever sold, percentage-wise.

In 2024 I was hired to work under the puzzle master Peter Winkler as an Instructor of Applied and Computational Math at Dartmouth College.