Bio

Nick Howell received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Oregon, and is currently a scientific fellow at the Higher School of Economics. His scientific interests lie in algebraic geometry, topology, linguistics, machine learning, and many other things. He has worked in experimental high-energy physics, computational climate and fluid modeling, and theoretical algorithm performance prediction in addition to his work in mathematics. Nick is an active free software, hardware, and culture enthusiast, is a judge and award-winning brewer of craft beer, and is an amateur but enthusiastic mushroom-forager, mountaineer and back-country skier. He speaks English fluently, and Russian poorly.

Project

Nick will join other mathematicians in improving the quality of the free software mathematics project Sage. Specifically, he will improve the support for working with lattices and quadratic forms, essential in understanding crystalline configurations.