I am Louis Wasserman, a rising senior at Montgomery Blair High
School.  I've lived in Maryland all my life.  I first began using
a computer--writing rather childish stories and such--at the age
of three.  When I was somewhat older, I would play Logical Journey
of the Zoombinis endlessly, just for the fun of the puzzles.  [Lately,
I've actually revisited the game, looking at the computational
difficulty of some of the puzzles as well as revisiting and playing
through the game itself, which I finally won once and for all!
Hehe.]  Interestingly, some informal surveys have indicated that a
lot of math/science talented people played the game as a child
(about 60% of the people I asked), and I'm half-curious to see if
anyone else at USAICO played it.

I taught myself QBASIC in fifth grade, and continued programming
through eighth grade, although I didn't have much direction beyond
my own interests at the time; a primitive epidemic simulator (6th
grade, in True Basic) and, in 7th grade, an even more primitive
network reliability simulator in Visual Basic gained me some
recognition at the county science fair, as well as the CIA, which
had a special award for such projects. I still lacked any algorithmic
training, so my programs were painfully inefficient and weren't
always actually accurate. (The network simulator took three weeks
to run on the three computers in my house in parallel.  Nowadays,
I've got just a little more experience than that.) By the time I
was in ninth grade, however, I had moved through three (comparatively
useless) programming languages--TI-BASIC, True Basic, and Visual
Basic--to C++, at which point I began doing USACO. I learned Java
in school and began using it exclusively, and I still prefer its
flexibility and structure, by which I mean that its libraries are
far more integrated and easily extensible than C++'s.  C++ libraries
seem to work on the philosophy that "We made one special implementation,
and we made it completely impossible to beat except for some
particular special cases; use our implementation for absolutely
everything anyway," while Java runs on the philosophy that "We built
a rather neat plug-and-play OOP framework, and it's very friendly
and easy to extend for any application you'd like, but...wait, you
want a fast program?  Good luck with that..."

Over last summer, I participated in the Hampshire College Summer
Studies in Mathematics.  My experience there has made me into the
person I am today; I now hope to pursue a career in academia in the
field of pure mathematics or theoretical computer science. Since
then, I have joined the technical staff of MBHS's online news paper,
Silver Chips <http://silverchips.mbhs.edu>, become a student
administrator on my school's Linux server, begun some work in
complexity theory under the guidance of a professor at the University
of Maryland, and become co-captain of the MBHS Computer Team.  My
other interests include Ultimate Frisbee, photography, journalism
and current events, philosophy [though I haven't been able to attend
Philosophy Club since Computer Team moved to the same time], and
teaching, as well as satisfying my extraordinarily unusual taste
in music.