alexhkurz.github.io

Alexander Kurz
Home-educating parent, Professor of Computer Science at Chapman University
Researcher in logic, category theory, and computer science
Formerly University of Leicester, CWI Amsterdam, Masaryk University Brno, LMU Munich
Google Scholar, DBLP,

Mathstodon, Nostr 1

“What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now, and if you are not working on that, why aren’t you?” (Aaron Swartz, documentary)

Brave: Reading the internet and watching videos without adverts.2

If we want to survive on this planet, we need to respect planetary boundaries and transition to a sustainable economy. Are our old ideas about economic growth still viable? What kind of growth do we want? Growth (at least naively construed) is not sustainable because sustained growth is exponential growth. (Even a modest 2% per year equals growth of 724% over 100 years and of 1,995,657% over 500 years.) While the Limits to Growth have been recognised for a long time, recent accounts are Dasgupta’s Review on The Economics of Biodiversity and the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Books

In early 2021, the University of Leicester threatened with redundancy some of the best mathematicians and computer scientists I know, former colleagues of mine. By the end of the academic year, if I counted correctly, 16 academics in mathematics and computer science either left their job “voluntarily” or were made redundant … more.

(research)

Projects
Publications
Talks
PhD students

(teaching)

Programming Languages (Fall 2023), Lambda Calculus to JavaScript Compiler
Algorithm Analysis (Spring 2023)
Compiler Construction (Spring 2022)
Short Courses: Automata and Haskell and Monads in Mathematics and Haskell
Student Projects
Postgraduate teaching

(miscellanea)

Airquality in Orange, CA
Predatory Publishers
Mathematical Genealogy, see here and here
How to make the simplest possible webpage

  1. I am not much on social media, but I am interested in decentralized social media such as Mastodon, Solid, Nostr and others. ↩

  2. I still meet people who use browsers that allow their reading/watching to be surveilled and interrupted by advertising … so I will keep that link here for now. ↩