About the Author

Lee Humphries is president of ThinkingApplied.com, Minneapolis, MN. He works in a variety of fields inventing algorithms, analytical techniques, and problem solving strategies.  He was originally educated as musician and holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in music theory from Indiana University. In the 1970s, he taught form and analysis at the University of Minnesota and co-authored a textbook on the development of musical perception.  He left academia in 1977.

For the next decade he conducted new music for the Minnesota Composers Forum (now the American Composers Forum) and other professional ensembles.  Concurrently he studied mathematics, economics, information processing, linguistics, and general systems theory. His musical swan song was a video marionette opera—a satirical comedy about robots and artificial intelligence that he produced under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1984, he steered himself into the sciences and founded a small interdisciplinary think tank.  He began to devise conceptual frameworks, models, and mathematical procedures applicable to investment finance, inventory management, bank analysis, musical learning, and planning theory.  Each project resulted in a practical solution to some problem that he had encountered in the real world. They all reflect his lifelong interest is the sequence of mental images that guide specific expert behaviors.

His interdisciplinary writing has appeared in publications of the Smithsonian Institution, the Bose Corporation, the Yellow Springs Institute, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the American Composers Forum, the Music Council of Australia, the Australian Music Centre, the National Dance Association, the Texas Fine Arts Association, the Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

He has served on the boards of numerous nonprofit corporations and one financial institution, often doing strategic planning.  For pleasure he coaches musicians, tutors youngsters in math, teaches a course in quantitative reasoning, and maintains a web site devoted to the American inventor and psychologist, Elmer Gates (www.elmergates.com). He is an affiliated member of the University of Minnesota's Center for Cognitive Sciences.