Michael Maller is a Professor of Mathematics at Queens College . He received his BA from Columbia , his MA from Harvard (philosophy), and his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick . Michael has been at Queens College since 1980. He previously taught at USC and Northwestern, and as an adjunct at Hunter College . He has published papers in differential topology, dynamical systems, and in continuous computational complexity. He has received grants from the NSF and the PSC-CUNY grant program and has been a reviewer for Math Reviews , Foundations of Computational Mathematics , and other journals, and served on the PSC-CUNY math panel. His political point of view was shaped by a summer spent as a voter registration volunteer for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the Mississippi Delta in 1965. In 1970, Michael was one of the organizers of an attempt to form a union of teaching fellows at Harvard. As the child of a NYC public school teacher, he is a second generation member of the AFT. He is a certified instructor and holds a 5 th degree black belt in Aikido. Michael believes the PSC should focus on issues of bread-and-butter unionism, and leave world politics to other organizations.