About me (so far)

I was born in the town of Aiken, South Carolina in 1997. I moved to the small town of Lugoff at a young age and lived somewhere between there and the even-smaller Elgin until I graduated high school. At this point I went by Robert Bliss rather than Robert Dougherty-Bliss. (There’s a different Robert Bliss who painted nearly-naked men.)

I studied computer repair and programming in high school, but was eventually swayed to pursue math my Senior year by my teaching-hero, David Caldwell. I graduated from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, where I got a healthy dose of philosophy and arts in addition to math.

I received my PhD in math in 2024 under my advisor Doron Zeilberger at Rutgers University. I first learned about Zeilberger by reading a copy of his book A = B I found in my undergraduate 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 of that book 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.