Photographs, Playlists, and More

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Photos

Here are a bunch of photos organized loosely by theme.

Flying
Pretty
Conferences
Everything Else
Music

Here are a pair of Spotify playlists that contain pretty much my entire taste in music. Best when shuffled.

A collection of fun songs. Not safe for work.

Instrumental music for working or studying.

About me

This is essentially an abridged autobiography, so feel free to skip over this entire section.

I am a graduate student at the University of New Brunswick, studying geometric group theory. My research is in Bass-Serre theory and JSJ theory; specifically, I am working on generating JSJ-like decompositions encoding all possible splittings of a group over cyclic edge groups.

I was born in Etobicoke, Ontario, at 10:48 PM on November 17th, 1998, to Jean and Gerald Cook. My mother, a recent immigrant from England, met my father through a strange web of mutual friends. They married in 1991, and had two children: first, in 1995, came my older brother Mason. My story started three years later.

Me, very young, with my granddad.

Only a few months later, my parents moved to Brampton, where I would spend the next nine years. I was an above-average thinker with below-average work habits, completing assignments at the last minute, if at all. My favourite subject was, predictably, math. In my early years I did have a fascination with physics and aviation, although not in a technical sense — I learned a few things about nuclear power, which I thought was cool, and I really liked planes. On the other hand, I had trouble making friends, a problem that would continue into high school.

My father and I out fishing.

In 2007, my mother accepted a position at Research in Motion (now Blackberry) in Kitchener, Ontario. We moved in August, although 9-year-old me was not very helpful. My primary contribution was making the beds while my parents unloaded the truck, something they appreciated after a long day. I would soon start grade four.

Enjoying a drink (responsibly, of course) with the neighbours.

In high school, I would focus further on mathematics and physics, taking both physics courses a year early. My high school years were colourful in a number of ways: I participated in — and won — numerous public speaking competitions; I hosted a radio show for two years; I was chief of the school’s technical theatre crew; and I attended a variety of Model United Nations conferences. One particular conference, in 2014, is where I lost a pair of beautiful leather gloves my parents had given me as a birthday gift not six months earlier.

Model UN Conference at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

During my years of high school, I was a member of Royal Canadian Air Cadets 80 Squadron, in Kitchener. The program would teach me the fundamentals of leadership, discipline, outdoor survival, and aviation. I rose through the ranks quickly, and in 2014 — only four years after joining — I was appointed the Cadet Squadron Commander, the highest position in the unit. I would serve in that capacity for two more years, retiring in 2017 as a Warrant Officer First Class. Despite these successes, I was a distinctly sub-par leader; my poor work habits left me running the show off-the-cuff most of the time, which was stressful for my command team and certainly not an ideal learning environment for my subordinates. I passed on all my knowledge to my replacement, Roman, who would prove to be a far more capable squadron commander than I ever was. He still has the rank badges I gave him at my retirement parade.

A pretty slick uniform, I think.

Through the Cadet program, I obtained my Glider Pilot License in the summer of 2015 at CFD Mountain View in Prince Edward, Ontario. I honestly did it for the clout, as all the “cool” kids were pilots, and I thought it would be good for moving up the chain in the program. This was despite being terrified of heights. Fortunately, my instructor Andy was an excellent pilot and an even better teacher. I spent six weeks learning aviation from the ground up, with classes on meteorology, air navigation, aviation laws, and the physical theory of flight. Andy and I would fly together for the first few weeks before I was cut loose and allowed to fly on my own, with my first solo on July 30, 2015. It was surreal, and my first taste of the freedom of flight. What struck me the most was the silence; no engine, no instructor, and no radio chatter meant I heard only my own heartbeat and the wind. I’ve been obsessed ever since.

Me and my instructor Andy waiting for our tow plane.

An interesting development during that summer… we lived in large H-blocks — military barracks — and slept together in long rooms filled with bunk beds. One evening, someone runs in shouting about some rap battle going on in the next block over. I decided to get up and see what the excitement was about, only to find myself roped in to the next four weeks of rap battles. To this day I still have my hat, which the others in my unit lovingly embrodiered with “Rap God”.

Rhyme chefs.

In 2016 I would, again through the Cadet program, earn my Private Pilot License at the Waterloo-Wellington Flight Centre. As my home airport, I had worked there for a semester through my high-school co-op, and so I was familiar with many of the staff. My instructor Dickson was firm but fair, a stark change from Andy’s relaxed approach. Dickson never allowed me to make excuses, and laid into my competitiveness to keep me at my best. Any time I made a mistake, he would take control, show me the maneuver — perfectly, at that — and say “See? I can do it, which means so can you.” Since then, that has been my motto with students in any subject: if I can do it, so can you.

After landing at Kincardine Airport on my solo cross-country flight.

I returned to CFD Mountain View in the summer of 2017 to obtain my Flight Instructor Rating, and spent the summer training three young students to fly, just as Andy had taught me two years earlier. It was an incredible experience, and there has so far been nothing as rewarding as seeing my students succeed on the foundation of my teaching. Each day we would travel to the airport, and when I wasn’t teaching classes, I was on the flight line with my students. One at a time, I would take my students flying, showing them maneuvers and teaching them the basic skills they needed to keep themselves safe in the air. I was as excited for their first solo flights as I was for my own. It’s tradition for pilots to be soaked by their instructor after their first solo; similarly, the first time an instructor has a student fly solo, they get soaked too:

Soaked after my first student flew solo.

In the end, all three of my students graduated with their licenses, and I couldn’t be more proud of the three of them.

My three students really carried the team.

I graduated from high school in 2016, and attended Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. There I spent four years earning an Honours Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics, with a minor in Physics. I planned on going to a larger school, but I’m glad I didn’t; Nipissing was perfect for me. The small classes led to a tight-knit group of students with easy access to faculty for help or opportunities. I would discover a passion for combinatorics and complex analysis thanks to Professors Karassev and Vasillev, who gently nudged me towards graduate studies. My first year was rough, and my priorities were not well-formed; I skipped class, refused to work on homework assignments, and failed to study for exams. I would correct these mistakes in my second year. One highlight of my first year was an opportunity to do research — one of the professors in the department offered me a fun challenge problem regarding sums of Legendre symbols. A fairly simple project, I jumped into the work feet-first and enjoyed every moment of it. The results were given in a talk at the 2017 Nipissing Undergraduate Research Conference.

Giving a talk on sums of Legendre symbols.

In my second year, I would start on the problem that essentially paved my way into graduate school: AMM Problem 12008. The problem asked about a particular way of shuffling cards, and how the cards would be distributed in the deck after some iterated shuffle. The problem would take me two years to solve (and I never did finish the last part), but the results were interesting enough that I would present them at five conferences across three countries. Easily the most memorable was the 2019 Australasian Combinatorics Conference at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. I travelled halfway across the world for a week to show my results to some of the best combinatorialists and graph theorists in the world.

My talk at 42ACC, 2019, at UNSW.

I graduated in 2020, with four years of knowledge and research experience, and started my new life as a Master’s student at UNB in September 2020. That particular chapter of my life is still unfolding.

Social

Social media links are provided for those who wish to get in touch with me outside of bussiness affairs.

My personal instagram account can be found @benjamincook17.

My voiceover instagram account can be found @bcook_vo. I also have a website: voice.brcook.ca.

I occasionally stream on twitch at the_alpha_waffle. Recordings can be found on YouTube.

No content shared on my personal social media are endorsed by my employer(s) or any organization of which I am a member, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer(s) or such organizations. By choosing to view my personal social media, you accept the risk of being exposed to content you may find objectionable.