Excerpt:

Somehow, David Gleich makes the world of algebra, algorithms and data sound like a lot of fun. A complete blast.

That's completely because while he's doing work that would fog the minds of most people, he's clearly having a good time.

Gleich (rhymes with bike), assistant professor of computer science at Purdue, received a career award in 2012 from the National Science Foundation to discover methods to analyze enormous modern data sets using modest computational resources.