Matthew Peter Szudzik was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1973 to a father who taught art in the public schools and to a mother who did laboratory work at a local hospital. He expressed an interest in astronomy at an early age, joining the Grand Rapids Amateur Astronomical Association (http://graaa.org) and serving as the president of its junior section from 1989 to 1992. He operated the planetarium and gave public astronomy lectures for a period of 8 years--first at the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium (http://grmuseum.org/planetarium) in Grand Rapids, and later at the University Of Michigan, Ann Arbor (http://umich.edu), where he received a degree in physics with highest honors in December of 1996. He began studying mathematics after graduation, and was hired as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram (http://stephenwolfram.com) in 1998. He served in that position for 2 years before leaving for graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University (http://cmu.edu). He remains there today in the Department Of Mathematical Sciences.