Email:
Telephone:
+49 (6221) 541 4060
(Email is probably better.)
Update:
As of 2020, this webpage is no longer current. I've moved on to the University of Munich, and my new webpage is available here. I will leave this here as a historical curiosity, although there is no guarantee it won't be purged at some point.
Lebenslauf:
I'm a postdoc at the University of Heidelberg, in Johannes Walcher's group at the Mathematisches Institut.
Previously, I was a graduate student in particle physics at Caltech, under Sergei Gukov. In the fall of 2020, I'll be moving to Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and joining Ilka Brunner's group. More facts and figures are accessible below:
As part of my duties here in Heidelberg, I'm helping to organize the Über-Seminar „Physical Mathematics“. At the moment, the seminar has moved online, and is held jointly with LMU Munich and the University of Vienna. We also have an informal group meeting for the AG Mathematische Physik; click on the link for more information.
Forschungsgebiete:
Over time, I've been interested in a range of things which—depending on your perspective—could be described as fairly wide or unbelievably narrow. Those that are relevant to this page are almost all related to one mathematical aspect or another of quantum field theory.
The list has included topological quantum field theory, knot homologies, moduli spaces, arithmetic geometry, real homotopy theory, and quantization. More recently, it's expanded to encompass discrete models of holography and a smattering of quantum information theory, as well as stratified spaces.
If you'd like some casual exposure to a few of these ideas, take a look at this introductory review I coauthored a surprising number of years ago now, which is written with a non-specialist audience in mind. Depending on your taste, you may also appreciate a similarly leisurely review of somewhat different terrain, written in the less distant past, or a smallish essay that explores the idea of field theories as a crossroads between topology and many-body physics. There are also videos available of lectures I gave in summer 2015, discussing a (still ongoing) story related to the first of these with an eye toward arithmetic.
If for some reason you'd like a CV that addresses more than what's here, or just feel like a little Kaffeeklatsch, please don't hesitate to send me an email.
