Born and raised in Columbus, OH and an Ohio State graduate (go Bucks!), Frank Swenton earned his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University under John H. Conway. He left Princeton for Middlebury College in Fall 2000, when he accepted a faculty position there. He is now Professor of Mathematics, currently splitting time with the Department of Computer Science at Middlebury.
Along with the animations provided here, Frank developed the system of near-numbers as a tool to help fill in the gaps in the classic (and outdated) pedagogy surrounding limits in calculus.
His research is in the area of combinatorial low-dimensional topology, and he is the author of the “Knot-Like Objects” (KLO) Software used by students and researchers in topology.