Harold Nelson, Ph.D.

Background

I was born in Centralia, but grew up in Olympia.

I graduated from Saint Martin's High School in 1961 and spend the next two years as a student at Saint Martin's College before transferring to Notre Dame.

It is interesting thinking about how different life was at the college then.

• The whole college occupied one half of Old Main.
• There were only three hundred, all male, students.
• Every academic department was the personal domain of a Benedictine priest.
• My father, a blue-collar brewery worker, paid my tuition without having o borrow money.
• The university did not even own a mechanical calculator. Computation was done with a slide rule and/or a logarithm table.

After that I spent quite a length of time as a "professional student." I won't go into the details, which you can see from my academic degrees.

I spent most of my working career as a senior data analyst, working for the governor's budget office (OFM) in Olympia. I led a team of data analysts working in SAS.

Areas of interest

I have always been interested in "mathy things." Right now, my primary focus is data analysis and the R language. I'm developing a strong interest in artificial intelligence. I also enjoy coding in python. In my earlier life, I specialized in mathematics and economics. To me these are all parts of a consistent whole.