My name is Svein Olav Nyberg. I really wanted to study dinosaurs, but then I
got all these strange books about the stars and the physical sciences. So
then I wanted to do physics instead. But
physics involves mathematics, and I
took a few courses of that at the University to be able to do good physics.
At the university level, however, mathematics was more fun than physics, so
I took some more math courses and dropped some planned physics courses.
Well ... I now have a PhD in mathematics from the Department of Mathematics at the University
of Oslo. I continued my doctoral work as a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh. The physicist
still shines through: My thesis work was on Brownian motion on fractals. Key
words in that study are probability theory, nonstandard analysis and potential theory.
If this piques your interest, take a look at my Edinburgh work page.
I did
my PhD studies at the University of Oslo
(in Norway, that is)
under the supervision of Tom
Lindstrøm, with financial support from NFR, the Norwegian Research
Council. I spent 1994 visiting Martin
Barlow and Ed
Perkins of the probability group at the Department of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia, in the
beautiful city of Vancouver.
On a private level, I try to make life as
interesting, pleasant and long-lasting as possible. 
For a
fuller experience of life, and just for the clarity of the moments
themselves, I meditate. I think the Buddhists have the most appealing forms
of meditation, and frequently find myself sitting with them. In Vancouver I
sat with The West Side meditation group; a very open and enjoyable
gang with ties to Ken McLeod (the Los Angeles lama, not the Edinburgh
author). Ken McLeod is a Canadian (ex) mathematician who was challenged
after graduation that he would never do anything interesting.The day after,
he packed his back-pack. When he returned three years later, he was a
Tibetan lama. He now works to integrate the eastern philosophy of buddhism
with western critical thought and has his own center in Los Angeles.
I am, however, not a Buddhist. For though I appreciate both their method and much of their philosophy, my impression from the Buddhist philosophers I have read is that they have a predominantly positivist and reductionist outlook - just with an added "spiritual dimension".
My
favourite in philosophy is Max Stirner, a
philosopher who is most known for having the strongest and most consistent
defense and statement of individualism. He bears some resemblance to
Buddhism in that he is striving to avoid fixed ideas about what one is and
is not. Stirner extends this attack to an attack on the notions of what one
"ought" and "ought not", noticing that these notions
are also fixed ideas. My interest in Stirner has led me to making the web
pages linked above, and to publish the 'zine non
serviam and to run the list nonserv.
I find Buddhist meditation very helpful in my approach to Stirner, and would recommend it to anyone wanting self-insight and real work on ridding himself of fixed ideas, not just theory. For the Buddhist, I would recommend reading Stirner, as he asks many questions a Buddhist cannot leave un-asked without falling prey to the trap of dogmatism.
Enjoying life, I hang out with my friends. Many of my friends are
people I met on the Internet the first time. In good character, I also met
my life companion Deborah on the net. At the time of this update (Yule
2001), we are one month away from becoming parents. I am very excited about
becoming a daddy.
For fur pleasure, I push my nose into my burmese cat Frøya's (right) belly - whenever that is possible. My parents adopted her since I had gone abroad so many times, so now I must count on visiting rights. Frøya is a bit lonely after Bast (left) was run over by a reckless driver, by the way. Bast was my first cat. I abducted her from her mother when she was barely a few weeks old. This was at the student dorm "city" Kringsjå, and the custodian had his annual stray cat purge at the time.
Life is too short to abbreviate by sheer stupidity. I therefore concern myself with health and nutrition, which means exercise and decently healthy eating. Seemingly counterweighing all this longevity, I can often be found hanging by my fingers in some climbing wall or the other. In climbing as in life, though, my goal is to reach the top, not to fall down.
With my strong emphasis on
individualism, it is perhaps no surprise that most of my friends are
individualists. I should emphasize that individualism is something I
appreciate in people of both genders, not just in those of my own. Many
"individualists" do unfortunately have a rather negative attitude
to women and/or women's individualism. I find the division into "the
strong" and "the weak" sex which underlies such attitudes
rather tasteless. I enjoy it when people consider themselves individuals -
and act that out. If you agree, you would probably like to check out my web
page on strong women.
If you have taken the time to read all the way down to this, you probably wonder what I look like and how to contact me. For what I and a few randomly selected friends look like, check out My pictures web. I should perhaps also note that this is my first web page - with life updates added at irregular intervals.
