About me

Let me tell you a few things I am excited about, such as …

… Science

I am fascinated by formal structures, the scientific disciplines that explore them, and their practical application. The great mathematician Henri Poincaré once said:

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

— Henri Poincaré

Of course, computer scientists and mathematicians are not the only ones finding abstractions. Every scientific model for a real world phenomenon can be considered an abstraction. So, with a bit of handwaving, we could arrive at the conclusion "Mathematics is the art of modelling", and that's how I like to see it. Besides coming up with the model itself, I am also interested in applying techniques from maths and computer science to them, such as simulations, probabilistic inference, machine learning, fancy heuristics, optimisation etc.

… Programming

While acknowleding the beauty of pure maths, I really want to build stuff and make my computer do something interesting with it. In that regard, I have the strong opinion that I should do what I'm good at, and so should the computer. And I am not good at making sure that I don't have a typo somewhere in thousands of lines of code, at being confident that I never use a non-existing value, at producing optimised low-level instructions, at managing dependencies, nor at calculating fast. This leads me to a distinct preference for programming languages with excellent compilers and expressive type systems. For me, Julia and Rust are the languages of choice.

… Communication

Science is much more fun if it's not done alone. So, if you don't run fast enough, I will talk to you about it. This website is a way to express my passion for science communication, but I have also done that in real life.

… Sports

When I'm not behind my desk, I enjoy some physical activity. I am a decent runner (if you know me personally, let's connect on strava!) and I do Rock'n'Roll dance (which is much more cardio and acrobatics and less Elvis than people tend to think). During the olympics or biathlon world cup events, expect to find me watching TV.