Matthew T. Dickerson

Who is Matthew T. Dickerson?

Matthew T. Dickerson is a professor of computer science at Middlebury College in Vermont, a scholar of the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien and the Inklings, a novelist, a blues musician and historian of music, a fly fisherman, a maple sugar farmer, and a beekeeper.

Dickerson received an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, under the supervision of Dexter Kozen, in 1989. His Ph.D. research was in symbolic computation, but since then he has worked primarily in computational geometry; his most frequently cited computer science papers concern k-nearest neighbor algorithms and minimum-weight triangulation. He has been on the Middlebury faculty since receiving his Ph.D.

He is also the author of six non-technical books, most of them about fantasy fiction. His 2003 book Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings, a study of the moral and Christian values expressed by Tolkien's works, highlights the contrasts between moral and physical victories, and between heroism and violence; it points out the necessity of having free will in order to make moral choices. It was shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Society's 2004 and 2005 Mythopoeic Scholarship Awards. He has also written a pair of books on Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and environmentalism, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien and Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis. Despite giving the first of these two books an overall negative review, reviewer Patrick Curry writes that it is "a major new contribution to the subject of Tolkien's work". His other books include The Finnsburg Encounter, a work of historical fiction, translated into German as Licht uber Friesland, Hammers and Nails: The Life and Music of Mark Heard, a biography of musician Mark Heard, and From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy.