Matthew T. Dickerson, Date of Birth
TweetMatthew T. Dickerson
British Tolkien scholar
Date of Birth: 12-Jun-1963
Profession: computer scientist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Gemini 
About Matthew T. Dickerson
- Matthew T.
- Dickerson is a professor of computer science at Middlebury College in Vermont, a scholar of the fiction of J.
- R.
- R.
- Tolkien and the Inklings, a novelist, a blues musician and historian of music, a fly fisherman, a maple sugar farmer, and a beekeeper.Dickerson received an A.B.
- from Dartmouth College in 1985, and a Ph.D.
- in Computer Science from Cornell University, under the supervision of Dexter Kozen, in 1989.
- His Ph.D.
- research was in symbolic computation, but since then he has worked primarily in computational geometry; his most frequently cited computer science papers concern k-nearest neighbor algorithms and minimum-weight triangulation.
- He has been on the Middlebury faculty since receiving his Ph.D.He is also the author of six non-technical books, most of them about fantasy fiction.
- His 2003 book Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings (Brazos Press, 2003, ISBN 978-1-58743-085-5), a study of the moral and Christian values expressed by Tolkien's works, highlights the contrasts between moral and physical victories, and between heroism and violence; it points out the necessity of having free will in order to make moral choices. It was shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Society's 2004 and 2005 Mythopoeic Scholarship Awards.
- He has also written a pair of books on Tolkien, C.
- S.
- Lewis, and environmentalism, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R.
- Tolkien (with Jonathan Evans, The University Press of Kentucky, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8131-2418-6) and Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C.
- S.
- Lewis (with David L.
- O'Hara, The University Press of Kentucky, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8131-2522-0).
- Despite giving the first of these two books an overall negative review, reviewer Patrick Curry writes that it is "a major new contribution to the subject of Tolkien's work".
- His other books include The Finnsburg Encounter (Crossway Books, 1991, ISBN 978-0-89107-604-9), a work of historical fiction, translated into German as Licht uber Friesland (Verlag Schulte & Gerth, 1996, ISBN 3-89437-422-5), Hammers and Nails: The Life and Music of Mark Heard (Cornerstone Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-940895-49-2), a biography of musician Mark Heard, and From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy (with David L.
- O'Hara, Brazos Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1-58743-133-3).From 1997 to 2001 Dickerson published a biweekly column on fishing and the outdoors in the Addison Independent, a local newspaper. Since 2002 he has been the director of the New England Young Writers Conference, an annual four-day conference for high school students in Bread Loaf, Vermont that is associated with Middlebury College.
- He is also the founding director of the Vermont Conference on Christianity and the Arts.
- He plays bass in a Vermont-based blues band, Deep Freyed.
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