Professor Daniel Ashlock has a doctorate in pure mathematics from Caltech. He has been a math professor for 23 years and taught twelve different types first year math courses at four institutions for majors in math, hard sciences, general education, biology, and business. He has developed five different first year courses. He currently holds a chair in bioinformatics with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics where he is a Full Professor of Mathematics. He has prizes for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level as well as for research. He has over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications in mathematics, computer science, theoretical biology, computational intelligence, artificial intelligence, game theory, and automatic content generation for games. He is a senior member of the IEEE and serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games, and Biosystems.

This video was recorded at TEDxGuelphU - Inside Out in November 2013. TEDxGuelphU is a student-organized TEDx event held annually at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. Each year we highlight emerging ideas, movements and talent from the University and surrounding community. For more information visit our website at www.tedxguelphu.com.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)