Biography

Basic Questions on the limits of human knowledge have long found a natural home in philosophy. However, in the twentieth century Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turning and others moved many of the more concrete forms of these questions into the purview of mathematics. It is their work that founded many modern topics in theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. My own research will concern the intersection of these two subjects, asking questions about the limitations of computation (understood very broadly) and the logical languages in which we define our objects of study. Although these subjects obviously influence our understanding of what may be done with ordinary computers, they also have a deep impact on our understanding of computation and definability more generally. Indeed, this marriage of the pure and the applied, combined with the philosophical intrigue behind so many of these questions, makes this topic uniquely interesting.