Who am I?
As far as I can tell,
I'm the only native English-speaking ‘Toby Bartels’
(or ‘TobyBartels’, or with varied capitalization).
If you know one and want to check whether it's me,
then you can either ask me or check here.
I have gone by ‘Tobi Bartels’ and ‘Tobias Bartels’
in the past,
but these names rarely refer to me.
If ‘Bartels’ is spelt differently,
then the odds drop dramatically.
(There seem to be
some native German speakers around called ‘Toby Bartels’,
although ‘Tobi’ is used much more commonly in that language.)
I am nonbinary and use singular ‘they’ as a pronoun in English,
and gender-neutral pronouns as much as possible in other languages.
You can call me ‘Mx Bartels’
or (especially in an academic context) ‘Dr Bartels’
if ‘Toby’ is too informal.
For my physical presence,
I was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the United States of America,
and I've lived there most of my life,
with these exceptions in southern California (also in the USA):
- Pasadena, from 1993 to 1996 and in 1998;
- Riverside, from 2000 to 2006;
- Upland, from 2008 to 2010.
I'm now back in Lincoln.
Of course, I've been in other locations briefly from time to time,
but I've never lived anywhere else.
If you think that you may have known me from years ago,
you could also try to recognize me
from these old pictures.
Here is a very incomplete list of my online locations.
This should not be taken as a list of suggestions of where to find me;
I usually don't put something here
unless somebody asks about it or I suspect potential confusion.
If you would like to check something not on this list,
please feel free to ask me about it.
- Bluesky since 2023;
- Dr.
Math
(now gone),
in the late 1990s, as ‘Doctor Toby’
(a name which is by no means unique to me, except there);
- Dudley's Dungeon comments from 2007 to 2009 or so,
on the original site,
on
the
straight
replacement
(now gone),
and on the
‘New, Improved’ replacement;
- Facebook
from 2011 to 2017,
where I still check for messages and post rare links and photos;
- Google+
(now gone)
from 2011 to 2015,
where I continued to check for messages and post rare links
until it shut down in 2019;
- Ko-fi since 2023;
- John Baez
used to mention me a lot,
since I was one of his graduate students,
and I occasionally comment on
his current blog;
- the n-Category Cafe,
since 2006;
- the Sluggy Freelance forums,
around the turn of the millennium,
before the current ones existed;
- Twitter (now X)
with a suffix ‘0’ on my name
from 2020 to 2024,
where I still check for messages and post rare links;
- USENET
(mostly on
sci.math.* and sci.physics.*),
between 1995 and 2003
(and at first also on the local Caltech USENET
that doesn't seem to have been archived anywhere);
- Wanderlost (about Sheldon the pig) comments
on
Modern
Tales
(now gone)
and on its own site;
- Wikipedia
(mostly the English one) and other Wikimedia projects,
since 2002;
- the
World
RPS Society
forums,
around the turn of the millennium,
before the more recent ones existed.
Go back to my homepage.
This web page was written by Toby Bartels, last edited on 2025 April 28.
Toby reserves no legal rights to it.
The permanent URI of this web page
is
https://tobybartels.name/identity/.
