Web Page of Martin Pergler

This is the web page of Martin Pergler, formerly of Ottawa, Canada; then a student at the University of Chicago; then a management consultant in Chicago and Prague (Czech Republic). I am now based in Montréal and Ottawa, Canada.

This page contains a grab-bag of items of potential interest, many of them dating to 2000 or before. To contact me, write to me by email at

pergler.org

Click here to go to the Pergler family web page

Risk management and risk-informed decisionmaking

I am a Senior Expert in Risk for McKinsey & Company’s Risk practice. The link includes an introduction to our practice and what we do. In addition, here are a few of my own relevant presentations that are available for public access.

Risk: Seeing around the corners, article in the McKinsey Quarterly and McKinsey on Finance (Autumn 2009) that has been quoted at various other places around the web.
Reducing risk in your manufacturing footprint, article in the McKinsey Quarterly and McKinsey on Finance (Summer 2009). See also Incorporating risk and flexibility in manufacturing footprint decisions, a more technical presentation on the same topic at the realoptions.org 2008 conference in Rio.
Working paper: Probabilistic modeling as an exploratory decisionmaking tool, an overall discussion (September 2008) on the use and limitations of modeling in strategic decisions, published in McKinsey’s Working Papers on Risk series.
As the greenback plummets, finding protection is possible, short article in the Globe and Mail (March 2008) on how Canadian companies can deal with the rising Canadian dollar / falling U.S. dollar. This article is pay-per-view for those who are not Globe and Mail subscribers.
Additional presentations I have made at the GARP Conference in 2008 and 2009, and the AFP Executive Institute 2008 and Corporate Risk Forum 2009, are available for members of those organizations.

Mathematics

My Ph.D. research

Research summary (my Ph.D. work on group actions on manifolds at the University of Chicago, advisor Robert Zimmer. Degree completed in 2000)
Papers arising from my Ph.D. work on Point stabilizers on connection-stabilizing actions and on Epimorphic subgroups of SL(n), trees, and the Tits boundary
Expository summaries (“topic exams”) leading up to my Ph.D. research : Kleinian groups and Mostow rigidity, Rigidity in symmetric spaces, and Rigidity of geometric actions of noncompact semisimple Lie groups (these were never intended for publication but formed the basis for oral exams)
A kinder, gentler introduction to the sort of math I did (broken links inside)
Words of wisdom for graduating math Ph.D. students at the University of Chicago

Expository papers on new takes on several undergraduate-level math topics

A paper on a different way to teach elementary calculus of exponentials and logarithms and another on repositioning the mean value theorem in a 1^st year calculus course
Ruminations on the Complex Newton Method and relations to the (real) Newton method in several dimensions
Some playing around I started on illustrating the iterations leading to Julia sets by coloring the complex plane (unfinished and I will likely never finish it—happy if someone else takes the baton on this one)

Broadly applicable teaching material handed out to my undergrad calculus classes

Written summary assignment that I gave to all my calculus classes to help review for the exam as well as practice writing about mathematics
A list of motivating questions for calculus, handed out to my 1^st year calculus students
A somewhat presumptuous one-pager on How Mathematicians Think, also handed out to my 1^st year calculus students
An elementary introduction to the Newton method

Music

I play clarinet, sing (bass-baritone), and play recorder and other early wind instruments. While I was a student at the University of Chicago, I became very active as an amateur and freelancer, participating as ensemble player and/or soloist with such groups as the University of Chicago Symphony, New Music Ensemble, and Motet Choir; the Rockefeller Chapel Choir, His Majesties Clerkes (now known as Bella Voce), the Contemporary Chamber Players, and Rainforest Baroque. In recent years, I have had very little time for music beyond chamber music for fun in someone’s living room.

Estimating the pitch change in a wind instrument due to carbon dioxide in exhaled air: note 1, note 2, and a classroom wrapper with pointers to experimental work done in Sweden (this one could equally well go in the math section)
A few photos from the Lake MacDonald Music Centre (CAMMAC), north of Montréal—a place I love.
A very old tuning program to help tune instruments using an IBM PC soundcard – runs in DOS mode on Windows PCs
3 snippets of me making music floating around on my PC, singing the baritone solo in an anonymous Magnus Dominus from Nouvelle France (Montréal), and playing measly seconds of a Czech Christmas carol and a Telemann suite on recorder

Truly miscellaneous

Online photo album from an October 2003 trip to Southern Africa