EPCC SSP Biography: Ben McNally

ben@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Name? Ben, "And it's BEN on my birth certificate" McNally.

Birthday? 6/7/73, and a typical Cancerian.

Early History? Born in Tring, England. Moved to Bangor, Northern Ireland at the age of three. Lived there until the age of ten, at which point he moved again. This time to Helensburgh, Scotland.

Quite well travelled then? Oh, and he was conceived in Germany.

What did he get up to in Secondary School? Just the usual stuff; Forced to play rugby in deepest winter, learnt how to make hot chocolate in home economics and watched West Side Story in music.

Any more signs of internationalism? Afraid not. He once got 0/15 in a German oral exam.

So what was he good at? Ben enjoyed science best. He and his friends took particular pleasure in tormenting their teacher with questions like, "How do clams mate?" and, "Do you hear the sonic boom in Concorde?".

I bet his teachers loved him! ...But little did they realise there were still another three McNallys to get through the system.

Why did he choose Computational Physics at University? "Choose" is definitely the wrong word. He initially enrolled for Physics and Computer Science, but cleverly dropped the Computer Science part in Freshers week. Then in second year, during a Fortran practical, his tutor said, 'Would you like to change to Computational Physics?"

And the rest is history? Please! Don't write him off just yet! Ben is about to start an Image Processing PhD in King's College. There's still a lot of debugging left in the old boy yet.

Any burning ambitions? Only to play rag time guitar.

Most likely to say... Phwooar! Look at the kerning on that!

Least likely to say... If a tree falls in a wood, and no one's around, does anyone really care?

A description of the project that Ben has been working on may be found here

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