Attended high school in Budapest and Havana, Cuba. Matriculated in 1973.
Enrolled in Physics course at Science University "Lorand Eotvos", Budapest, and in 1975 transferred to the University of Havana. Graduated with the degree of BSc (Hon) in 1979.
Attended course of Mathematics at the University of Havana - in final year of course when leaving Cuba in October, 1981.
From January 1982, PhD student at the School of Physics, University of NSW. Left course unfinished in 1986 to take up employment at the University of Sydney.
At the University of Havana conducted seminars on electromagnetism for 3rd year Chemistry students in 1977-78.
Tutor in the Mechanics laboratory, for 1st year Physics and 2nd year Chemistry students, in 1978-80.
Coached the Cuban high school students' team for the International Mathematical Studies Olympiad in 1980-81. Incidentally, both in 1972 and 1973 winner of the Cuban National Mathematics Competition for high school students - was inelegible in national team due to Hungarian nationality.
Tutor in the 1st Year Physics Laboratories of the University of Sydney in 1983-86 and in the 1st Year Physics Laboratories of the University of NSW in 1985-86.
From about 1976 was involved in the research carried out in the School of Physics of the University of Havana, mostly in the application of X-ray diffraction to quantitative analysis and to the characterization of crystalline disorder. In Mathematics, carried out some research in Measure Theory.
My PhD research topic was inelastic light scattering studies of phase transitions, mostly from the viewpoint of lattice dynamics.
I "speak" fluently FORTRAN, C and BASIC, assembler (VAX/VMS MACRO) and machine language. I can understand (with the "dictionary" manual in one hand) some other languages like LISP, PASCAL and ALGOL.
Had exposure to several operating systems: UNIX (Apollo Domain/OS, fluent in csh, ksh, sh and Aegis shell), VAX/VMS (I am fluent in DCL), Apple DOS 3.3 and ProDOS (not much of an operating system), MS-DOS (IBM clones, Apricot PC, Sirius), P/OS (DEC Professional) and NOS and KRONOS (Cyber).
Have been employed part-time in the 1st Year Laboratories of the Universities of Sydney and NSW between 1983 and 1986.
Since 1986 I worked at the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Sydney as Computer Programmer. Initially I worked on a VAX/VMS system, writing and updating application programs (mostly FORTRAN) for use by departmental staff and students, and some help in managing the system (i.e. making files/programs available or protected, and setting up simple commands to do complex things). My duties also included the routine maintenance of terminals and printers, and simple trouble-shooting support (anything not needing a soldering iron) for the microcomputers used in the department.
In 1988 the School has purchased some Apollo workstations. I became the system manager for this network, which has then replaced the VAX. (This network currently comprises over 160 nodes.)
Paul Szabo psz@maths.usyd.edu.au (dated about 1989)