1. Family background
2. Where he was
3. The big projects
4. Organized Activities

Bob Jenkins was born in Akron, Ohio in 1966 to Barb and Bob Jenkins. He is at least 1/4 Welsh, 1/4 German, 1/8 English, and 1/16 Irish.

Very few relatives are on the web anymore.

• My sister Laura makes Welsh Lovespoons.
• My mom was a wildlife artist.
• My dad sings in St Paul's Men & Boy's Choir in Akron.
• Uncle Marty has a farm.
• Uncle Jeff is active in the Rotary club.

Bob now lives in Redmond, Washington, with his son. His wife Justine is a short slight blonde person (see the sketch on the right). She grew up in Salinas California.

Bob grew up in Akron. A rough history of where he's been:

1. He attended King School for grades K-6 and Litchfield and Firestone for grades 7-12. He did phenomenally well in grade school, excelling in math, art, and music.
2. He did very well in high school (Litchfield Junior High and Firestone High), studying math, physics, chemistry, computers, and German.
3. At Carnegie Mellon ('85-'89), he dropped out of Electrical Engineering to major in Math and Computer Science. He did pretty well. He got a bachelor's in Math/CS and a masters in CS (thesis was on knots) in 4 years. He was a nature director at Camp Winnebago in the summers of '86 and '87, and developed software for IBM in Owego NY in '88. He was in CMU's Math Studies program, which emphasized proving things instead of memorizing formulaes.
4. '89-'92 was spent in Foster City, California, working for Oracle. He started ballroom dancing and met his future wife (Justine Ehlers).
5. A year at UC Berkeley in the doctoral program for theoretical computer science convinced Bob that he didn't want to become a professor.
6. After leaving Berkeley in '93 he returned to Oracle. Justine married him in '94 (on a beach in Monterey), and they bought a townhouse in Foster City.
7. Bob and Justine had a girl in '98, a boy in '00, and another girl in '02. That's it says Justine, three's enough, no more after that.
8. They moved to Redmond, Washington in 2006, and Bob went to work for Microsoft.

Bob is always working on some project in his spare time.

1. In grade school, it was learning piano and composing music. He won a national contest for a piano piece he wrote in 3rd grade.
2. In high school, religion and philosophy was the subject. In the end Bob concluded that he didn't believe in God after all, and philosophy was depressing. He tries to avoid these subjects now.
3. College (Carnegie Mellon) saw guitar playing, mathematics, NP-completeness, and the weekly comic strips Overload (printed in the Tartan, the newspaper that printed what people wanted to hear) and Spare Change (printed in the Student Union, the newspaper that printed what people wanted to say). Overload featured a student named Mike, his roommate Paul, the setting of Carnegie Mellon, and no plot or character development. Spare Change, also sometimes titled short change, loose change, loose shorts, or whatever the editor thought he remembered at the moment, tended to be one-panel things.
4. Perpetual motion machines were the project for the three years between Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley, when Bob first worked for Oracle. He did Oracle numbers, snapshots, and from-clause subqueries at that time. He got into the stock market and barely broke even for a number of years. He also dabbled with science fiction and children's stories.
5. Berkeley was an endurance test. He lived in the damp basement of an ivy covered building on the corner of College and Dwight. Once he slept through a jackhammer that was a foot away from his head (the arrangement of the bed, the window, and the sidewalk outside made this feasible). Sometimes he did 16 hour days (12 awake, 4 sleep).
6. After Berkeley convinced Bob that he did not want to become a professor, the project became pseudorandom numbers. It started with a cryptography course from Manuel Blum at Berkeley. Bob bought a 66mhz 486 in July '93 and started writing random number generators and tests for them. ISAAC took shape around April '94 and was published (Bob's first publication!) in February '96.
7. In February '95, the Hash Join project at Oracle made Bob realize that all the tools for random numbers worked equally well on hashing, and that existing hashes were pretty bad. His second publication was an article on hashing in Dr. Dobb's in March '97. In 2007 he entered a cryptographic hash in the government SHA-3 competition, but researchers quickly broke it.
8. In December '95, he discovered that CompuServe provides space for a web page. His life seems to be a hunt for entertaining ideas and solutions to problems, which are both useless without some way to publish them, so the web is a truly wonderful thing.
9. Fall of '97 Bob took a Java class, and December of '97 he built a color choosing widget in Java. Summer of '98 he built a solar system simulator, and in early '99 he found good formulas for numerical integration of the n-body problem.
10. Tiling the plane with pentagons is in the background; it is a problem he knows how to solve with flashy (but useless) solutions. Compare that to hash lookup, which is terribly useful but very tedious to explain. It appears other people have completely solved the problem of pentagons which tile the plane anyways. In late '98 and early '99 Bob painted some of these tilings on his bathroom walls.
11. Genealogy was a big thing at age 10, briefly reemerged at age 16, then came back again in force in 2001 with the discovery of genealogy software. He wanted to find all his third cousins and tell them who their third cousins were. In 2006 he started putting genealogy pages on the web, in 2007 he had a go at making a genealogical wiki, and in 2010 he filled out his corner of the world on Ancestry.

Organized activities often played a large role.

1. The American Aquatics Union taught Bob to swim like a fish.
2. Piano lessons were fun, and gave Bob familiarity with chord progressions.
3. Little League did not produce a great baseball player, but Bob did acquire a knack for spotting four-leaf clovers.
4. St. Paul's Men & Boy's Choir, first as a treble and later as an alto and bass, included many Madrigal Dinners and trips to England and Italy. Bob thinks that singing in a choir is an excellent team sport.
5. Various church youth groups were part of the teenage experience.
6. Boy Scouts tried to make a leader out of Bob, without much success. Nevertheless, as a diligent student he made Eagle, and he quite enjoyed being a nature director for a Boy Scout camp in college. Boy scouts and youth groups had lots of skits.
7. A Phi O, a co-ed service fraternity at CMU, provided people to hang out with. Again, Bob did not seem interested in this leadership thing.
8. He hasn't belonged to much of anything since CMU.

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