In 1981, my oldest son was killed under Saddam’s Arabization of Kirkuk at the age of 12. In the years following, during the Arabization, Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Barzani, Halapja, and Anfal people.
In 1990, my family and I decided to give up my 23 years of living in Kirkuk and career as a math teacher. We journeyed the long road of freedom to America by giving a smuggler $45,000 to escape Iraq. Unfortunately, we entered Turkey and became hostages of another dictatorship and yet again endured racism. The next day, Turkish soldiers brought us to B~igijjni village at midnight to hand us (my four sons, my wife, and me) over to Saddam’s soldiers to die at the border between Turkey and Iraq.
After a year of homeless and prison in Turkey, we arrived in the U.S. on September 26, 1991. Although I started my American life from zero, I continued on to earn a BA and Master Degree in Math. I taught seven years in American high schools and then became Arabic teacher at Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. I then became a linguist with U.S. Special Forces in Iraq. You can read more about my journey in my book We Survived Iraq and Turkey—Long Road to Freedom, available at Amazon.com.
Now, as a math researcher at the age of 75, I’ve solved five of the world’s previously unsolved math problems. In July 2019, I released a book on the math problems I’ve worked on (Book Title: Unsolved Math and Arts, also available at Amazon.com). These are the problems below:
1- Euler Perfect Box
2- Fermat’s Last Theorem: an +bn=cn (on less than 2 pages)
3- Right Triangle: a^x+b^y=c^z
4- Cubic Root for real number by Hand
5- Collatz Sequence Conjecture
In addition to my work at a mathematician, I also paint oil landscapes. I am happy to share them with you here!
