Matthew T. Dickerson is a professor of computer science at Middlebury College in Vermont,[1] 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.[2]
Dickerson received an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1985,[1] and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, under the supervision of Dexter Kozen, in 1989.[3] 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[4] concern k-nearest neighbor algorithms[5] and minimum-weight triangulation.[6] He has been on the Middlebury faculty since receiving his Ph.D.[2]
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 (Brazos Press, 2003, ISBN 9781587430855),[7][8][9][10] 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.[7][8] It was shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Society's 2004 and 2005 Mythopoeic Scholarship Awards.[11] He has also written a pair of books on Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and environmentalism, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (with Jonathan Evans, The University Press of Kentucky, 2006, ISBN 978-0813124186)[12][13] and Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis (with David L. O'Hara, The University Press of Kentucky, 2009, ISBN 978-0813125220).[14] Despite giving the first of these two books an overall negative review, reviewer Patrick Curry writes that it is "a major new contribution to the subject of Tolkien's work".[12] His other books include The Finnsburg Encounter (Crossway Books, 1991, ISBN 9780891076049), a work of historical fiction, translated into German as Licht uber Friesland (Verlag Schulte & Gerth, 1996, ISBN 3894374225), Hammers and Nails: The Life and Music of Mark Heard (Cornerstone Press, 2003, ISBN 9780940895492), a biography of musician Mark Heard,[15] and From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy (with David L. O'Hara, Brazos Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1587431333).[16]
From 1997 to 2001 Dickerson published a biweekly column on fishing and the outdoors in the Addison Independent, a local newspaper.[17] Since 2002 he has been the director of the New England Young Writers Conference,[18] an annual four-day conference for high school students in Bread Loaf, Vermont that is associated with Middlebury College. He is also the founding director of the Vermont Conference on Christianity and the Arts.[18][19] He plays bass in a Vermont-based blues band, Deep Freyed.[20]