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, 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. 

June 12th, 1963 in (Age 61)