Jim Belk
Personal
Family and Friends
I am married to Maria Belk (pictured to the right), who is also a visiting assistant professor of mathematics here at Texas A&M. We are good friends with (and live across the street from) Melanie and Jim Pivarski, who moved to Texas A&M from Cornell the year after we did.
My younger brother Ryan is a first year at Georgetown law school, and my younger sister Marisa is a second-year graduate student in the Cornell math department. My parents are both lawyers working in upstate New York.
Background
I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but my parents moved around when I was young, eventually settling in upstate New York. I graduated from Union-Endicott high school at the age of 15, having already taken classes for two years at Binghamton University. Two years later (in 1998) I graduated from Binghamton with a double major in math and physics, though I stayed at Binghamton the following year to get a master's degree in math.
I had been intending to go into physics, but at the last minute I reconsidered and applied to graduate schools in mathematics. I started at Cornell the following year, which is where I met Maria. I graduated with a Ph.D. in August of 2004, but then spent an extra year at Cornell as a part-time faculty member while Maria finished her dissertation. We were married in January of 2005, and we moved to Texas the following August to begin three-year postdocs at Texas A&M. We are very grateful to the unviersity for solving our two-body problem, and we can only hope we are as lucky when we apply for tenure-track jobs next year.
Hobbies
I really enjoy keeping track of current events. I regularly read the Op-Ed pages in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I'm also a big fan of Slate Magazine. I don't get cable, but I love both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and I usually watch most of the segments on Comedy Central's website.
You can probably tell that I like computers. I used to be much better with them than I am now, but I'm fairly pleased with how this website has turned out. Everything I know about HTML and CSS I learned by reading the W3 Schools website.
I used to play video games a lot—I have very fond memories of my original Nintendo. I also played Dungeons & Dragons when I was a kid, and at Cornell I played in a weekly D&D game with some college friends of Maria's. Other geek things I should probably own up to include being a big fan of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Lord of the Rings, and everything created by either Joss Whedon or Douglas Adams.
I really like the game of bridge, and I'm sort of aspiring to be a bridge expert. After a long hiatus, I've recently started playing regularly on Bridgebase with Maria and sometimes Ryan, and Maria and I are intending to check out the local bridge club sometime this semester. I was really into bridge as a graduate student—I own about 30 bridge books, and I even wrote a website on bridge bidding. If I have time, I'm hoping to revise the site and move it to the Texas A&M servers sometime in the near future.