Who am I?
As far as I can tell,
I'm the only English-speaking ‘Toby Bartels’
(or ‘TobyBartels’, or with varied capitalization)
on the Internet.
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 on the Internet (or elsewhere) rarely refer to me.
If ‘Bartels’ is spelt differently,
then the odds drop dramatically.
(There seem to be
some German speakers around called ‘Toby Bartels’,
although ‘Tobi’ is used much more commonly in that language;
while I know some German, I've written almost none of it online.)
Of course, there's no telling what names other people have used
to refer to me.
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 (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.
You could also try to recognize me
from these old pictures.
Here is a (very incomplete) list of my online locations:
- 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;
- I was on
Facebook from 2011 to 2017,
and I still check for messages and post rare links and photos;
- I was on
Google+
(now gone)
from 2011 to 2015,
and 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
since 2020;
- 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that doesn't seem to have been archived anywhere);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.
If you know or suspect any omissions (and there are many),
then please feel free to ask me or remind me!
I usually don't put something on this list
unless somebody asks about it or I suspect potential confusion.
Go back to my homepage.
This web page was written by Toby Bartels, last edited on 2024 June 14.
Toby reserves no legal rights to it.
The permanent URI of this web page
is
https://tobybartels.name/identity/.
