Personal

My last name is pronounced “YOR-ghee”, with a hard G sound, a long E at the end, and with the stress falling on the first syllable. It is not pronounced “yor-gay” or “yor-jee” (the two most common mispronunciations I hear). It is probably derived from the Greek word γεωργός (“farmer”, literally γη + ἔργον = “earth-worker”) although no one knows for sure. If you are ever in Lancaster County in southeastern Pennsylvania, you can take your clothes to Yorgey’s Fine Dry Cleaning, which was started by my great-grandfather.

My wife and I are enthusiastic (though not all that good (yet)) bridge players. I can read ancient Greek decently well and am currently learning biblical Hebrew, in addition to (intermittently) learning a bit of German and Spanish. I enjoy playing Go, though I haven’t played much in a while.

For keeping track of things and keeping myself productive I use a combination of Roam Research, FogBugz, Beeminder, TagTime, Clockwork Tomato, anki, Trello, and LeechBlock. I’ve been particularly influenced in my thinking and practice by Cal Newport’s Deep Work, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and Mark Forster’s Final Version system. All highly recommended if you’re looking for ways to become more organized and productive (and especially if, like me, being organized and productive is not your natural tendency).

My Erdős number is at most 4:

• Weirich, Stephanie; Yorgey, Brent A.; Sheard, Tim. Binders unbound. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming (ICFP ’11), 333–345, ACM, New York, 2011.
• Ahn, Ki Yung; Sheard, Tim; Fiore, Marcelo; Pitts, Andrew M. System F_i: a higher-order polymorphic λ-calculus with erasable term-indices. Typed lambda calculi and applications, 15–30, Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci., 7941, Springer, Heidelberg, 2013. MathSciNet MR3107243.
• Makkai, M.; Pitts, A. M. Some results on locally finitely presentable categories. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 299 (1987), no. 2, 473–496. MathSciNet MR869216 (88a:03162).
• Erdős, P.; Makkai, M. Some remarks on set theory. X. Studia Sci. Math. Hungar. 1 1966 157–159. MathSciNet MR209167 (35 #70).

Here is (a portion of) my academic genealogy, as recorded in the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

I occasionally enjoy constructing American-style crossword puzzles. I use Qxw and Peter Broda’s word list to assist with construction, set all the clues myself, and then host the puzzles with exolve. I mostly make these for my family, so they contain some inside jokes and references that won’t make sense to anyone else, but others may still find them enjoyable (and solvable).

• Ode to a Bin (15 x 15)
• Ducks in a Row (15 x 15)
• Elemental (21 x 21)
• Looney Spoons (21 x 21)