Gary Stephen Perlman was born at the Herbert Reddy Memorial Hospital in Westmount, Quebec,a suburb of Montreal. He mostly attended public schools, Westminster Elementary and Wagar High School in Cote Saint Luc, a predominantly Jewish suburb of Montreal. He decided in his final year to leave Quebec to avoid the CEGEP system and ended up attending the University of Rochester. Despite a spotty academic career in Montreal, he thrived in Rochester, earning a BA in psychology with extensive coursework in math and the new field of computer science. He graduated Magna Cum Laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, distinctions he had never heard of. He applied to about a dozen graduate psychology programs in cognitive psychology, and was admitted to about half, in part due to his National Research Council (renamed the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council) graduate award from the Canadian government. He chose to attend UCSD, in part because his advisor told him he'd regret passing up a chance to live in San Diego for grad school.

At UCSD, his focus was on learning processes and decision making, but he spent a lot of time taking courses in computer science, and was actually registered in that department for a year. During that time, he devoted a lot of time to programming, developing a statistics package that is still used 40 years after it was created. His dissertation was on what makes an artificial language (e.g., mathematical notation, programming languages) easy to learn and use. After UCSD, his career was increasingly directed toward software.

Gary's first position was at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ where he was a member of the technical staff. He spent most of his two years there in the Advanced Software Department, where he worked on techniques for large scale development of software systems, such as statistical packages, in particular, S. It was while he was at Bell Labs when he met Caroline Palmer, then a graduate student in clinical psychology at Rutgers. Caroline decided to switch to cognitive psychology and transferred to Cornell. Gary decided to leave AT&T for an academic career and moved to the Boston area where he joined the Software Engineering faculty at the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies. He taught there for three years until it's demise, and for her final year, Caroline moved to Boston to do research at the MIT Media Lab. During that year, Gary was a visiting Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and he spent a few months at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, answering The Firesign Theatre's question "How can you be in two places at once, when you're not anywhere at all?"

Caroline and Gary were on the job market, trying to solve the two academic body problem, and both ended up at The Ohio State University, Caroline in psychology and Gary in Computer and Information Science. They were married at their home in Worthington, Ohio in 1990. Mark was born in 1993. The family of three spent a year at Stanford where Caroline visited the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and Gary took care of Mark and consulted in Silicon Valley. Back in Ohio, George was born in 1996, by which time we had moved to a larger house on a lot over half an acre. Gary continued at OSU, but was consulting at information technology companies more and more until he left OSU to work for OCLC.org full time.

Caroline continued at OSU until 2003 when she accepted a Canada Research Chair at McGill University, where she would have more collaborators in her research areas. Gary continued working for OCLC.org, telecommuting for about 10 years until his retirement. Mark and George attended public and private schools in Westmount, learning French in addition to the usual subjects. Both boys were active in sports and elected to the Selwyn House Sportsman's Guild. Mark went to the University of Chicago in Mathematics and is now in math grad school at Stanford. George is currently at McGill in Biology. Caroline continues her research at McGill. Gary spends much of his time doing genealogy, especially volunteer genealogy for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal (http://jgs-montreal.org), where he is the webmaster, and compiling family trees for residents at the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Cote Saint Luc (across the street from Wagar High School). He also finds time for various information technology endeavors, such as http://wagar.ca, a compilation of all the high school yearbooks in its history.

All of us are dual citizens. Gary naturalized in the United States, Caroline in Canada, and the boys are dual citizens by virtue of their US births to a Canadian parent.