I've enjoyed making kids laugh since I was in 4th grade when I wrote my first silly story and read it out loud to my classmates. In the decades since then, I became a mathematician, a programmer, a ballroom dancer, a father, a high school teacher, and now a children’s novelist. Inventing ideas for the enjoyment of others is my favourite thing to do on earth.

My goal as a children’s author is to help teens find human connection amidst the whirlwind of social media & AI that dominates their lives. As a dad of 3 teens and a high school teacher of 3,000 of them, I know the challenges teens face: their fears, their foibles, and their burning need to break free of the limits they were born into—in whatever century.

Though novels are my first love, there's almost nothing I won't write. I’ve written sermons for my church, math raps for my students, and speeches for our high school commencements, which I’ve emceed every year since 2021. When COVID cancelled our 2020 commencement, my principal asked me to write a grad speech on YouTube for our senior class. My mathy animations on my YouTube channel SchattmanMath have attracted 2M views and thousands of comments from adults thanking me for helping them visualize math in a new way. 

I have a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University and a B.S. from the University of Chicago.

I was raised in Fort Worth, Texas. A dual citizen of America and Canada, I now live in Canada with my wife, our last teenager in the nest, and our mathematical pet, Helix the cat. I’ve also lived in Passau, Germany and Salzburg, Austria, und ich rede gerne auf Deutsch!

I hope you’ll enjoy my triune passions for humor, science and language folded playfully into the paragraphs of Custom Friend.