My father Larry, is a mathematician, violinist and trombonist. He received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1967, having graduated from Columbia College in New York City before that. Since 1967, he has been on the UCSB faculty, and he has also had visiting faculty positions at MIT, Notre Dame, and Dartmouth. My mother Susan, is also a mathematician (a retired text book editor) as well as a singer, pianist, a wonderful cook and gardener. My brother David, is a prodigal writer, cartoonist and historian. He played the piano a tremendous amount as a kid - Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Joplin, improvisations to early cartoons with the sound off... - and could sit down at a keyboard anywhere and whip out a medley of ragtimes or classical repertoire. I joined my family many times at his recitals and competitions. My mother’s father was Ira Katz, who used to be based in Glendale, California (originally from Chicago) where he worked as a self-taught scientist and inventor of special effects for movies (slimes, fluids, smokes, explosions... Back before computer animation, he was making all the stuff by hand. The marshmallow goop and green slime in Ghostbusters (I remember getting a couple jars of it in the mail); the tracks of fire left by the car in Back-to-the-Future; the Freddy Krueger glove... There are too many to name, including countless fireworks and stage effects for rock bands...), managing an enormous warehouse-of-a-business which specialized in science equipment and chemicals of every kind. His office was covered with certificates and awards for his work. Like science, he was also a chef, and had a room filled entirely with cook books. He was good friends with photographer Ansel Adams, who he provided solutions for developing his pictures, and so I grew up seeing his pristine black and white nature photography in books which would come to have quite an inspiration on me as a child when I began taking photography seriously. His wife, my grandmother Anne, was sisters with the mother of saxophonist Lee Konitz. My father’s father, Sam, originally from Brooklyn, was a psychologist at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Naval Base. His mother, Faye, was a pianist, also from Brooklyn, who was the first musician to have their own show at Radio City Music Hall.