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Close-up headshot of a man with blue eyes and stubble against a wall.

Dr. Andrew Schopieray

Assistant Professor

I was raised in a northern Michigan village located about 2 miles south, but over 800 miles west, from Plattsburgh; I have since lived and worked in Washington, Oregon, California and Wisconsin state-side, and also in Australia and Canada internationally. I love nature, wildlife, photography, and generally being active outdoors. I taught my first mathematics course (College Algebra) in the Fall of 2010 at Western Washington University and have taught over 20 different subjects in mathematics since then. Linear algebra is my favorite.

I earned my Ph.D. under the advisement of Victor Ostrik, the winner of the 2024 Chevalley Prize in mathematics, at the University of Oregon. I was trained in representation theory whose goal is to understand complicated things (e.g. algebra) by translating them into less complicated things (e.g. linear algebra). This area of mathematics has been particularly useful in the study of quantum physics, and the mathematical tools that I have developed are used by mathematical physicists working in the general area of conformal field theory.

A conformal field theory is a wild amount of data, but if you look at a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of these theories, you get mathematical objects known as tensor categories. A few more shadows later, and you end up trying to understand linear algebra. For this reason, I have many projects that are approachable to undergraduate and graduate students since you don't need to understand the “why” to be able to start computing and proving things. I encourage you to email me if you would be interested in trying your hand at some mathematical research (it is far less scary than it sounds).

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