Biographical

My name is Ari Cukierman (pronounced AH-ree SOO-ker-min), and I grew up in the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C., where I was lucky to attend the rather excellent Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. From there, I went to the College of William & Mary to study physics and mathematics with a brief interlude at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Then I flew across the country to spend six years working towards a doctorate in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, after which I hopped across the San Francisco Bay to work as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. After four years and most (but apparently not all) of a global pandemic, I moved to Caltech to work on a space telescope called SPHEREx.

1990s

By far the most productive decade of my life, it was during this time that I mastered the art of bipedalism, self hygiene, literacy and even arithmetic. Already by age 10, I was one of the most highly skilled primates to have ever lived.

2000s

Probably the strangest decade of my life, my adolescence was spent bouncing aimlessly (but confidently) among the piano, the library, the soccer field, the guitar, the planetarium and the theater. A few notional attempts at teenage rebellion were largely unsuccessful, and I ended the decade approximately the same teacher's pet that I had been at the start.

2010s

I spent most of my twenties fulfilling the terms of the generous grant I'd received over the previous two decades from the Cukierman Family Foundation for Exceptional Children (thank my mother for that joke). In the spring of 2018, I walked across a stage wearing a flowing robe and a silly hat, and now you may respectfully address me by my childhood nickname: Dr. R.

Lake Tahoe, April 2019

Family

Don't worry: there are more Cukiermans to meet. My father Valentin (Val) grew up in Wrocław, Poland and is currently a high-school teacher of Russian language. My mother Carolyn grew up in Valdosta, GA and is currently a consultant. In 2020, my brother Aviv completed a PhD in physics at Stanford, where his research was concerned with fundamental particles and interactions using data from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He now works (as of Aug. 2022) at a hedge fund called PDT Partners.

Travel

I've traveled to a respectable number of places (so long as you don't consider Africa, South America and most of Asia to be "places"), and I've started keeping track of them on this map. It was a little tricky to decide which locations to mark. First of all, there was the question of what it really means to have been somewhere. Then there was the question of how much detail to include.

I have to admit I didn't really settle on a satisfactory prescription, and the result is a travel map that is both incomplete and misleading. At the very least, however, it is true that I have stood very near to all of the markers on this map and that I have something nontrivial to say about my experiences in all of those locations. Some of the markers represent a richer collection of stories than others. Please ask if you're curious.

South Pole, December 2018

Arguably the most exotic place I've been is actually not available on Google Maps: the South Pole. (I think it's because the underlying data structure uses a Mercator projection, which you can read about in my Notes on Physics.)

Malibu, October 2023

Cycling

I somehow evolved from a soccer chauvinist to a spandex-wearing road cyclist. If you're in my neighborhood, join me for a ride! If not, you can still follow me on Strava.