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 mom is a wildlife artist.
• My dad sings in St Paul's Men & Boy's Choir in Akron.
• Uncle Marty has a farm.
• Uncle Jeff is a professor.
• Aunt Gretchen paints murals.

Bob now lives in Foster City, California, with his wife, Justine Ehlers, their son and two daughters. Justine's a short slight blonde person (see the sketch on the right). She grew up in Salinas and is a C++ developer. She is now on sabattical, taking care of our children.

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 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 where he still works. 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, three's enough, no more after that.

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).
6. After Berkeley convinced Bob that he did not want to become a professor, the project has been 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. He started with hashes for hash lookup, and has been gradually learning enough to attempt designing cryptographic hashes and block ciphers. His second publication was an article on hashing in Dr. Dobb's in March '97.
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. Because of the web page, random people all over the globe mail Bob the oddest questions. (His favorite was, "I put okra in my thermos and the next day the thermos exploded. Why?") Bob almost always responds. (For example, the answer to that one is that glass thermoses sometimes do that. You should get an all-steel thermos from Thermos or Nissan instead.)
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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. Bob's more interested in finding cousins than in finding ancestors. In 2006 he started putting genealogy pages on the web, and in 2007 he's having a go at making a genealogical wiki.