Professor Covington is not a hobbit, but he does live in a house that would make Bilbo Baggins proud. It's a very peaceful, 132-year-old Italianate Victorian, with bee hives in the backyard.
Bees are very organized, which is an inspiration to the Professor. As he sees it, all of Creation is ordered and beautiful, and it is Mathematics that best expresses this order and beauty.
He has had a special interest in Mathematics all of his life. Even though he preferred to play Scott Joplin on the piano, his sister made him learn J.S. Bach. That was a good thing: although Joplin is rompingly good, nobody but nobody develops a theme as Bach did. And that's some serious order, folks.
The good Professor had the good fortune to take the highest Mathematics courses available in high school, which included Calculus and Trigonometry. That prepared him to be a tutor while in college studying electronics at DeVry. He helped his classmates, others' classmates, and even his own roommates.
Not happy with one Bachelor's degree, he sought a second one, this time in electrical engineering, which is like a Mathematics playground. Statistics was added to the roster at this time. Crazy-famous people's names cropped up while he studied at the University of South Carolina, such as Faraday, Maxwell, Ohm, Henry, DesCartes, Bernoulli, Euler and Gauss. Each one of these had a phenomenal idea, and you can be sure that the Professor knows about it!
His thirst for knowledge still not slaked, Professor Covington went to GA Tech - at their campus in France, mind you - to study electrical engineering further, with yet more Mathematics. This time Number Theory and Cryptography came into the picture. These topics added Discrete Mathematics and Group Theory to the palette.
As a side note, the Professor participated in the first-ever live video chat over the Atlantic Ocean. So he was an early participant in the technology of the video aspect of your sessions!
Now back in the States, complete with an MSEE, your humble Professor offers you his broad and varied background in the service of figuring out how to comprehend the order before you, and perhaps to find the beauty in it.
What's especially nice about getting his help is that Professor Covington will meet you through the miracle of that now-well-developed modern video technology in your own hobbit-hole, where you are comfortable and at ease. Bilbo would approve.
