Biography

During my study of mathematics, I became aware of the fact that mathematical concepts are unfortunately inanimate. You may regard an idea in your mind and see how it behaves, but as soon as you stop thinking about it, it stops moving. Computers, on the other hand, can bring these mathematical concepts alive. When a concept is represented as a computer program and executed, it will act independently of us, and that fascinates me. This is why I chose to change my career path from pure mathematics to computer science. In my PhD in computer science, I will consider the situation in the opposite direction: what is the mathematical object that underlies a program running on a computer? For most real world programs the answer is not clear and that is a problem. Testing is rarely sufficient to find all the bugs in a program, but if we know the underlying mathematical object, we can use mathematical techniques to find them.