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About the Team
Team Photo   Daniel P Whalen
Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Junior


Hobbies
Games (Video: RPG/Adventure), running (5km/1000m/800m), reading (currently, as a result of my girlfriend’s encouragement, Ireland and Rosen, but when I actually possess time unused by her or school, Epic Fantasy/science fiction)

Clubs
That would require being sociable.

Experience
U.S. Physics Team; various other unimportant Math/Science competitions.

Biography
For me it was trivial to realize that a list of my accomplishments would be unbearably tedious both to read and to write; that despite an inherent human love for boasting and that while I could comment on my getting $m$ on the AP Calc Exam in $n^\text{th}$ grade, for $5\leq n,m\leq 8, n,m\in\mathbb Z$, this would echo too greatly every other biography last year and probably this year (I apologize to those who are unenlightened in the ways of Tex). The first few years of my life are best described by the following excerpt: “I start my story in a small German hospital in a room devoid of office supplies. As a result of my lack of memories of the time, I will elaborate: The night was dark, except for the gleaming full moon above, its rivers and seas perfectly visible on its background, and silent except for crashes of thunder on the roof; the clicking of staplers could not be heard in the background. The Grandfather clock in a dusty corner of the room, dreary, and rotten, its bronze hands longs since rusted to green, struck midnight and the soft scream of a newborn was heard to break the monotony of the staplers’ lack of noise.

By the age of two, I lived in America, a land replete with pollens, which would be the cause of repeated stabbings in the next year and though at least fourteen in the future, and probably many more, all under the guise of giving me good health. ‘Allergy shots are for your own good,’ they claimed, but it is obvious that nothing good can arise out of the placement of sharp metal objects into one’s arm other than the sating of the doctors’ sadistic tendencies."

After that, from the age of $5\pm .5$ I have survived on the West Coast (despite the Eagle Tribune’s (an Andover, MA newspaper’s) description of me as a “hometown boy” after making alternate to the traveling team last year). It was not until my first year at a boarding highschool that I could return to the delightful Eastern weather.

These years were perhaps the best years of my life, if only because they are the best remembered. They made me suffer through ugly computations in multivariable calculus, real and complex analysis before letting me partake in the bliss that is Number Theory (at least it will be when I understand the zeta function of a projective hypersurface). The Academy has forced me through the torment of AP Chemistry, before allowing me to comprehend Physics (quantum and Newtonian) and to realize the ugliness of application of the Hamiltonian equations of motion in Special Relativity. Recent life has given me an opportunity to play DDR, allowed me to recover from MMORPGs, forced me to walk half a mile to the nearest class (to be another half of that next year), and perhaps best of all, brought me to understand that summers are best spent doing old five hour Physics exams.