The pandemic caused some unfortunate delays in my completion (and having employment that thankfully was accommodating to my need to finish helped a lot, but also slowed me down), but I finally defended my dissertation, titled “Applying, evaluating, and accelerating clustering”. It seems that I’ve won both the college’s awards for teaching excellence and research excellence on the way. The first chapter is a work I have discussed here previously on $k$-means image compression. The second chapter presents CatSIM, a method for comparing categorical maps, such as one might obtain from labeling pixels in an image. The third chapter presents a parallelization of the Hartigan and Wong clustering method. Now I just have to get these papers published – the first two chapters have already won student paper competitions and the second is undergoing revisions, but all three are still somehow far from publication.