Jim Propp

Who is Jim Propp?

James Gary "Jim" Propp is a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

In high school, Propp was one of the national winners of the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad, and an alumnus of the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics. Propp obtained his A.B. in mathematics in 1982 at Harvard. After advanced study at Cambridge, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He has held professorships at seven universities, including Harvard, MIT, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Propp is the co-editor of the book Microsurveys in Discrete Probability and has written more than thirty journal articles on game theory, combinatorics and probability, and recreational mathematics. He lectures extensively and has served on the Mathematical Olympiad Committee of the Mathematical Association of America, which sponsors the USAMO. In the early 90s Propp lived in Boston and later in Arlington, Massachusetts.

In 1996, Propp and David Wilson invented coupling from the past, a method for sampling from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain among Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms.