About Me
Hello. My name is Tristram Brelstaff. I live in Reading (UK) with my wife Elisabeth (Liz) and daughter Zoe.
When I was younger I used to do a lot of variable star observing and published a few papers on the subject. You can find copies of them on my Variable Star Papers page. I was also director of the Variable Star Section of the British Astronomical Association for two and a half years. However, I gave up my variable star work in 1995 when my daughter was born, but I might take it up again some time in the future.
I am interested in the formal aspects of computer programming. I have developed a way of looking at the formal specification of object oriented systems that doesn't seem to have been published by anyone else. I might get round to writing it up some time. In the meantime I will discuss bits of it in My Computing Journal. For light relief I have been helping transcribe scanned-in documents for the E. W. Dijkstra archive at the University of Texas at Austin. Dijkstra was a true genius who created whole new areas of research in computing science. If you only associate his name with the GoTo statement then you should really take the time to look through the archive. Another computing scientist whose work greatly impresses me is Leslie Lamport. I have used some of Lamport's algorithms and methods for dealing with concurrency in my work.
The title of this web site is a reference to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a novel by Lawrence Sterne, after which, I am told, I was named.
