I am retired from a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics at Texas A&M University in College Station. I had the University title of Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence and the System title of Regents Professor.

The mathematics classes that I taught ranged from first-year calculus to graduate seminars and from analysis to algebra to applications. My favorite parts of teaching have been interacting with students and learning new things.

My main area of research has been the theory of functions of complex variables. Together with my Texas A&M colleague Emil J. Straube, I received the 1995 Stefan Bergman Prize from the American Mathematical Society for contributions to the boundary regularity theory of the inhomogeneous Cauchy–Riemann equations on pseudoconvex domains in multidimensional complex space. My most highly cited paper is a joint article with Dmitry Khavinson generalizing to higher dimension an old theorem of Harald Bohr about power series; our work turned out to have a deep connection with the local theory of Banach spaces.

I have been interested too in the effective communication of mathematics. I served as Editor of the book-review column in the American Mathematical Monthly (1998–1999) and as Editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (2001–2003). My article Reflections on the Arbelos received the 2009 Chauvenet Prize, the most prestigious award for mathematical exposition given by the Mathematical Association of America.

My mathematical genealogy traces back to David Hilbert, and my Erdős number is two.