Bio

Julian Pfeifle works in discrete geometry, an exciting area of mathematics at the crossroads between combinatorics, topology, algebra, geometry and computation. He uses computers a lot in his research, both as a tool for quickly testing conjectures and as a means of arriving at answers that would otherwise be inaccessible due to the sheer size of the computation. Most of his research revolves, in one form or another, around polytopes, high-dimensional analogues of familiar solids such as the cube, dodecahedron or icosahedron. Using computational tools is an interesting way to build his intuition for geometric properties of objects in higher dimension, and the use algebra allows researchers to obtain much more precise information than by purely geometric processes.

Project

Sage is the leading free software project for general-purpose mathematical computations, and polymake is the leading free software project for geometric, and to some extent algebraic, computations in discrete geometry. Both of these projects heavily rely on talking to, and incorporating, other free software projects for computations outside their immediate area of expertise, and so it makes a lot of sense to build bridges between the two. As a long-term member of the polymake project, I would like to collaborate with the members of the sage team to find ways to let our projects cross-communicate.