Library/People of IOG: Dr. Lars Brunjes

People of IOG: Dr. Lars Brunjes

Mar 31, 2021· 2:03:04· 27K views·indexed 5mo ago

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hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado welcome to people of iog and today we&#39;re joined by a very special guest iog&#39;s director of education dr lars brunes and my good friend lars thank you so much for coming on how&#39;s your day been thank you for having me uh very nice actually last weekend we still had snow but now the spring finally arrived so it&#39;s very nice and sunny i think was 21 degrees no idea what that is in fahrenheit but very nice and warm yeah and you&#39;re based in munich these days or just outside of munich yeah it&#39;s 100 kilometers of munich it&#39;s called regensburg it&#39;s very nice 2000 year history roman founded that beautiful medieval downtown so it&#39;s very pretty i&#39;ve never been to rigginsburg although i&#39;ve been to munich so that&#39;s my only place of uh of reference but i think that&#39;s close to a large forest so that uh it must be beautiful okay so let&#39;s start from the beginning i always love doing these interviews uh in a kind of a chronological order so where are you from where were you born let&#39;s start there i was born in vupatal which is in the rural area it&#39;s it&#39;s relatively small town i think there are only two claims of fame i think engels was born him of i mean the collaborator of marx and we have a schweiber bahn that&#39;s i think the only commercial hanging train in the world it&#39;s because um it&#39;s it&#39;s um in a narrow river valley and they somehow didn&#39;t have space to to put like a train or a tram there so they built these the train hanging over the river so there are pillars left and right to the river and then the train is hanging beneath it and yeah that&#39;s basically the only claim to fame of that city and this was back in the 1970s i&#39;m born in 1971 yes 1971. so what was 1971 germany like let&#39;s uh let&#39;s try to get an understanding of the setting i mean i obviously can&#39;t remember that far back but i mean i do remember that i mean when i grew up i was very much scared because of the cold war and i mean it was west germany i grew up in cologne incidentally i moved from um from uber time when i was one year old my father got a job in cologne so i grew up in cologne but uh yeah i mean so even though it was west germany it was quite scary times with with the cold war and we also had relatives in in east germany so i visited a couple of times as a child my father actually is born in vienna in east germany and he um he actually um basically escaped to the west uh when he was in primary school i think his in those days it wasn&#39;t so strict i mean the wall hadn&#39;t been built but uh so his grandfather worked for carl zeiss gamer yina which is still a thing i mean they built these high quality optics and i think his grandfather was a salesman for them so he could travel to the west and he took my father illegally and hit him under his coat in the train compartment to smuggle him out to the west and this was a back in the 1950s or 19th century yes i i don&#39;t i think my father was like 10 years old or something he learned writing in east germany and then had troubles because they somehow used a different system in west germany primary school so he had some trouble adopting so yeah must have been early 1950s so so your uh your father was smuggled in a coat uh right when the cold war was starting to brew a bit and uh immediately had a little bit of a culture shock now uh what what was west in east germany well in terms of of how you travel between so you mentioned when you were in your early years about 10 years old or something like that you actually went to east germany so how did you actually do that because i believe the wall was up at that point yes but um i mean not everybody actually could travel i mean you needed a visa but because we had relatives so my father&#39;s aunt and and their daughters were still living there so we had relatives so we could travel and um and um but it was very scary especially for me as a child because um i mean there i mean not the void i mean the wall the literal wall was just in berlin right but i mean there was this like death strip with watchtowers and uh automatic uh guns and and watchdogs and it was this huge border control installations so it was very scary and they really really um checked you very very carefully so they basically took apart the whole car because some people escaped like in petrol in gas tanks or or under the seats so they more or less really disassembled the car and took off they disassembled your car traveling they put like sticks into the tank and and you had to like flip the back seat over to to show that nobody&#39;s hidden there and and really really carefully study your face and they took your passports and then the passports disappeared they had this conveyor belt thing where the passports were hanging and then disappearing and then you have to wait for half an hour so until they came back and then of course you were worried if you if they decide not to give it back to you what then then so you grew up in cologne when you were a little child and then you&#39;re visiting your relatives in eastern germany what was the culture difference like was there like an aura of fear or what was what was east germany like i mean i always like felt very depressed somehow i mean the most striking thing was the lack of color somehow i mean first of all like commercials not that i&#39;m a big fan but um i mean they add color to a city and as soon as you cross the border that wasn&#39;t there although you did get some of these big propaganda posters everywhere that was i mean like um with our friends of the from the soviet union to peace and prosperity and uh united workers for peace and and i mean you had these huge propaganda posters but apart from that it all looked very gray i mean no commercials no ads and also no paint because they i mean a lot of people couldn&#39;t afford to paint their houses so everything had this gray and dilapidated somehow other hand i mean of course i mean people are people so it&#39;s not as if everybody was permanently depressed there but there was this air of of fear because i mean there were lots of spying i mean for example i mean neighbors reported on each other so everybody had to be careful what they&#39;re saying and i mean they did tell political jokes of course but um always had to be careful that nobody&#39;s listening and reporting you to the secret police and right and we had to report to the police i think so once we got there the next day we had to go to the police precinct and uh basically register that we are there and so that was also a bit scary obviously and yeah so as a child in particular i always felt quite um scared there so it was definitely a culture shock and then obviously also i remember i mean it&#39;s not that they were starving i mean they had enough to eat and but um for example my relatives invited us and then we ate and i mean i was a child so i didn&#39;t know any better and then i took like two sausages because after one and then everybody was looking shocked and then later my parents told me that that was very rude of me because obviously they had been so happy that they actually got these sausages for the special occasion and they got exactly one for each and i just grabbed one because i was so used to um i mean in west germany that if you are hungry i mean there&#39;s always plenty and you can eat as much as you want so uh as a child i didn&#39;t realize that i mean how rude that was that um wow stuff like that or once i i played with a boy point pen and broke it i mean not on purpose but it just i was like fooling around and broke it and my aunt was very upset and then i said yeah but what are you getting upset about just buy a new one i mean because it&#39;s a i mean it doesn&#39;t cost anything they throw them after you everywhere normally right i mean that was a big big thing so that was really horrible that i broke that so did you have any brothers and sisters no i&#39;m a only child okay and what did your father and mom do so what was your father&#39;s profession they are both mathematicians in a sense so my mother was a high school teacher for mathematics and physical education and my father was a mathematician he worked in an insurance company so nowadays he would say actuary i think right so you had a from the very beginning a very rigorous uh very analytic family uh and um and i suppose computing was just being introduced to uh to germany especially west germany around the uh the the 70s so what was your what was your earliest computer did you ever have one at home or did you have access to one as a child yes actually i mean as you said in the 70s and then at some point probably late 70s my father&#39;s department got one like one like ibm 5110 i believe that had base basic and apl and was something like 50 000 or whatever and so he and then he made the mistake to tell me about it and then i became so interested and at that time we were on vacation in austria and doing a lot of hiking and me being a child i was bored and then my father the whole vacation entertained me by telling me about how computers work and what he can do with it and my mother was highly irritated because she always had two traips behind us while the two of us were talking about computers and then when we came back um that was just when the one of the first home computers came out that was in my case uh sinclair zx 81 this is a little plastic box with a plastic keyboard that&#39;s just for your keyboard so it&#39;s no individual keys and it has one kilobyte of rum and basic hardwired in so we ordered that when we came back from that vacation but then the whole three weeks or so remaining of the summer vacation somehow because uh it was just a very small startup and they were sitting in achen and basically sold the stuff from a garage so that problem is delivering so i was desperately waiting for this computer to arrive and didn&#39;t come so i am i took my mother&#39;s typewriter and wrote basic programs on the typewriter because my father had given me some manuals from from his work so i learned basic but i mean i couldn&#39;t try it out but then i used the typewriter to actually write my first programs but i couldn&#39;t try them so i had to run them in my head and then basically on the last day of the vacation the this little set x81 finally arrived and so what was that was that uh a zylog system or an intel system what was the uh what was the cpu and the assembly how did that work as a z80 okay eight eight bit right and the basic was basically in the rom so you just plugged it in and immediately you had a basic cursor and as i said one kilobyte rum but i immediately from the beginning had a 16 kilobyte drum memory extension but no hard drive of course and the only like mass storage was a tape recorder so and you had to connect it with a normal microphone cable and that was horrible because you had to get the volume of the tape recorder exactly right to um if if you made a mistake and it took long of course i mean like i had a flight simulator at some point and that took eight minutes or so to load and if you didn&#39;t get the volume right then you had to rewind and that&#39;s a nice analog to digital conversion there um that&#39;s that&#39;s really cool so what what was your first program that you wrote with that that you remember uh i do remember trying to draw a sine graph i don&#39;t know whether it was the very first one but i think one of the first because it also didn&#39;t have high resolution graphics it had 64 times 48 pixels so it was like very rough but i remember doing a sine graph and and just simple stuff i mean ask like writing your name 100 times and i mean i was like 11 or 12 or something so it wasn&#39;t very sophisticated but well not many 11 year olds were programming their own computer writing sign graphs i think you were a little bit of a head of the curve for that one so what what were your teens like so were you still in cologne at the time your dad&#39;s still an actuary and your mom still yes yes okay so what was jer what was german education like in the 19 i guess it would be the early 80s at this point in west germany right i think it&#39;s still this i mean i don&#39;t know whether it has changed much too i mean germany we had this i mean first it&#39;s four years primary school and then we have this i think it&#39;s unusual in the world system where basically we have three different types of high schools and you can i mean one is basically for people or at least that was the original idea for people that intend to become craftsmen or do i mean work with their hands and then middle one is for like um like accountants and and people that work in a bank or whatever and then the other one is those two are um six years and then the third one is nine years and that&#39;s if you want to go to university and in principle after primary school you have to decide i mean it&#39;s possible to to change afterwards but it&#39;s not very easy so actually the the direction is set quite early in germany and it&#39;s difficult to to switch again um of course nowadays i mean it shifts that i mean it&#39;s not like that the strict thing anymore but we still in most bundeslander provinces we still have this system with the three different high school things and so i did go to the one that was nine years for university and um yeah i mean well let&#39;s talk about that so you obviously have to make a decision a major life decision very early uh and why did you choose university was it because you always knew you wanted to be a mathematician or you just knew you were going to go to university but you hadn&#39;t decided why not be a carpenter why not be a plumber what was the what was the impulse there i mean i i mean i of course didn&#39;t decide it i mean that was i was 10 years old or so so i think the idea is that the primary school teacher makes a recommendation and normally you follow that and but your parents can overrule it if they want and i still remember that i honestly didn&#39;t know i mean i had no idea at some point what i would wear where i would go and i was quite surprised when for my parents it was no question that obviously i will right around the same time i was living in hawaii and my parents made a decision to move to colorado i was about the same age and i said i want to stay in maui if they say no you have to come to colorado well i didn&#39;t know what to say so i understand going along for the ride okay so uh you&#39;re in the 1980s germany now you&#39;re starting to come of age and you&#39;re obviously aligned with mathematics and computing and i guess the first major decision is as you get closer to university do you become a mathematician or do you become a computer scientist or you&#39;re going to become an engineer i mean so the theory versus the applied side of things and so where where where&#39;s your mind at 15 year old 16 year old lars i mean those i mean germany is very backwater in a lot of regards especially when it comes to like you know technical innovations so i mean i still remember i was very frustrated i mean my father always used to bring me these computer magazines and stuff and one of those i i was 13 or so i read that some um what do you say these days first nation on native american reservation school had had gotten like 30 commodore 64s for for their classroom and i mean at that time my my whole school had like one atari is something okay so so and i mean that is like a typical story for germany it&#39;s still like that i mean we&#39;re very so there was not much in the in the line of of computer education i mean i did have some con i mean yeah computer science at school but that was also horrible because the teachers of course had no clue um i remember one teacher was my physics teacher so he only used the computer i mean for for him anyway everything was just to support physics although mathematics for him was just i mean you just do mathematics in order to to solve physical problems and you just used to use computers to simulate physical systems so you only care i mean we did like orbits uh earth around the sun simulations like that but i mean not data structures or anything um yeah so that was quite not very appealing and i mean there were universities in germany that that would have done that but i mean i was like a bit of a uh my mama&#39;s child so so i also didn&#39;t really want to go away so i wanted to stay in cologne and cologne you couldn&#39;t even study computer science as a main subject you could only take it as a minor subject so that&#39;s what i ended up doing doing mathematics and then computer science as a minor subject but i also haven&#39;t really regretted it because in in some sense computer sciences is more or less a subset of mathematics i mean obviously not like hardware but but i mean large parts of it are more or less a subject of mathematics and i really did enjoy mathematics so i haven&#39;t regretted that okay so so you decided to go to university in cologne to stay at home now when you were in your teens and early 20s did you travel a lot i know you went to east germany but did you on austria but did you go anywhere else like africa south america or asia during that time period um i mean my mother had a phobia of flying i mean by now in the last 20 years or so she has flown but but only like three hours or something so so so we were restricted to europe but but we always like to travel so i mean all over europe uh so we&#39;ve been scandinavia england ireland scotland france spain italy um not so much eastern europe but but the western europe i mean a lot but not i think turkey was like the most exotic one i got with my parents basically i had a foot in asia and this over the bridge in istanbul so how old were you when you went to turkey oh i think i was quite that was for my parents 25th anniversary i think i was already i had started university already so 20 or something okay yeah turkey&#39;s a wild wild place i uh i really love it did you have a chance to go to the cappadocia and actually see those those little spear mountains that they have no i didn&#39;t i mean my parents have been there by now and were very impressed and did the balloon right and so on but i haven&#39;t yeah that&#39;s uh that&#39;s one of those once in a lifetime trips you have to take okay so german universities they&#39;re legendary for rigor they&#39;re legendary for discipline or at least that&#39;s the the brand that they like to broadcast so what was what was going to uh and what university of cologne did you attend um maybe i should mention that before university i first had to do military service in principle oh well we that&#39;s a big part of your life let&#39;s go there [Laughter] although i mean we did have this um this draft and everybody every man had to go in principle but you could um claim that you&#39;re a pacifist and then basically had to go to trial to prove that you&#39;re a pacifist and then you could do so social service instead right so i i ended up doing that and it wasn&#39;t as bad anymore i mean i had always heard these horror stories that when it started in the like late 60s or so when we started having army again after the second world war they were really strict with uh with this pacifist thing so you really had to go to to a trial and and they asked really difficult questions i mean they did like imagine a bunch of russians is attacking you or raping your your wife and you have a gun wouldn&#39;t you uh try to shoot them and stuff like that but in my days but when when i was there it wasn&#39;t so bad anymore so i basically just had to write an essay and then um there was this mustering thing so and then there was this room full of officers looking at me grimly and then one had this essay and said are you still standing by that looking at me and says and then you&#39;re okay i had no idea that pacifism trials were uh were a thing that sounds like a very german thing [Laughter] yes okay so would you write the essay you&#39;re out of out of morbid curiosity how do you sell yourself as a german pacifist in 19 like 1988 or 1989 i think i i mostly used i don&#39;t know whether you know that novel uh i in germany it&#39;s invest needs noise i suppose the english title is nothing new in the west or something it&#39;s like i mean at least in germany it&#39;s a very famous anti-war novel from the first world war about this class of of young high school students or i mean that basically in their last year get drafted into the first world war and then they all die i mean over the course of the novel so that&#39;s basically what the book is about and that&#39;s one of the most famous anti-war ones um right so i basically quoted that and and then passage passages from that and and i mean there&#39;s lots of stuff about how useless it is and uh senseless violence and and that the the the enemies are also just humans and and things like that right right so so you picked your favorite anti-war boy i probably would have cited bertrand russell and his critique of world war one uh or maybe tolkien&#39;s experience is world war one but uh yeah that&#39;s great that&#39;s great so you went on pacifism trial you passed so you had to do a year of social service instead so what yeah actually it was even longer i mean they they claimed it would be the same for for people that go to the army and for the social service things but it was three months longer and i mean the official reason was that i think if you go to the army then you&#39;re supposed to for the next 10 or 20 years or whatever every now and again for a weekend go back to to some maneuver and if you do the social thing you don&#39;t have to so that&#39;s how they justified that it&#39;s three months longer but obviously it was just um so 15 15 months of fun and adventure so what exactly did you do you know what what what made social work comparable or desirable over military work um i i mean in germany i think it&#39;s also one of the few countries in the world where we actually have religious classes at school so i mean i think that i&#39;m not completely sure whether but anyway there at some point might even have been hitler that made a deal with the church that basically the church gets to teach in german schools and and the state pays every everybody every cleric below the level of bishop something like that so in any case so we had like regular religious classes you could when you turned 14 you could um opt out of that if you wanted to but i mean by default you&#39;re at religion classes and uh one year when i was 14 or so the teacher was actually not a teacher but a like a protestant priest from from the parish nearby and he was very nice so i really enjoyed his classes so then when the time came for the social work actually you can i mean they they pick something for you if you but you can also suggest something and of course it&#39;s better if you suggest something otherwise you end up god knows who aware um so so i saw he had like a on the i mean he had a note at our school that he&#39;s looking for for somebody so i applied to that and then he he agreed to take me and that worked out so i so i worked for this parish church and it was mostly like a um caretaker sort of so i was mowing the church lawn and cleaning the toilets and also like more and more fun things like um driving the church bus and picking up the old ladies for the for the bible classes and i have this driving miss daisy bernius edition that just comes to mind who use a little chauffeur hat driving the bus okay so you were a gardener for a church for your for your military social service and uh and i assume you probably became friends with all the old ladies yes that was the best part they were very i mean it was very endearing how grateful they were for i mean for the chance to be able to talk to somebody and and actually what was also a lot of fun this priest he was a very hands-on character so he was always running around in coverall and repairing things and and he had this massive old-fashioned printing machine in the basement and i mean the church was printing lots of stuff like this church newsletter once a month and and all sorts of things and in order to to save money because i think it was cheaper than photocopies if you made a thousand copies um he used this old-fashioned printing press to to print stuff like the church newsletter and then that was actually the the highlight of my month every month because i then got to sit there for two days in the basement not having to talk to anybody supervising this this machine but it was really difficult because you i mean you could for example set the speed and if you i mean if you set it too slow it takes forever and if you take set it too high then sometimes paper gets pulled into into these all these rolls and wheels and stuff and then you have to if you don&#39;t stop it very quickly then you have to disassemble the whole thing and wipe off the the the paper remains of everything so i always in this this this printing ink that it&#39;s impossible to wash off your hands so in those days i always had like black hands to my elbows and but that was a lot of fun and uh just sitting there and trying to work the machine so you were a gardener a bus driver and a master printer covered in ink and there was never an urge to become a forger and try to use the printing press to create something else actually i think i i i think i pre i try to print like business cards for myself at some point stealing church property that&#39;s damnation right there okay so you finish up at the church and you go to the legendary german university uh and that that&#39;s in cologne uh the the for your undergrad yes uh just one more thing through the church thing because i mean it was and once it was nice somehow to to do something completely different and i mean you can think a lot while you mow the lawn i actually enjoyed that it&#39;s very meditative but at some point i also got really bored intellectually so um there are these national competitions where you can um that we had in mathematics and also computer science and it&#39;s normally for for students at high school but uh there was this rule that somehow it&#39;s it&#39;s by your day of birth and not tight so in any case in that year where i was working for the school even though i wasn&#39;t at school anymore i was still allowed to enter so that was actually intellectually speaking the highlight of that year or those 15 months that i could work on on these problems a bit i think i didn&#39;t get very far maybe this third round or something but but anyway that was fun too so were they like correspondence problems where they&#39;d send you a collection of problems you&#39;d work on them and fill them out solve them send it back or how did that work yeah i mean it was just i mean printed like four problems and then you were supposed to write programs and document them and and send it in i think on a i think you said in the disk it was before the internet so probably i put a disk into an envelope and sent it in or something yeah i think so so so uh actually that brings up an interesting question so math competitions were definitely a huge part of eastern europe and russian culture you know the olympiads and these other things uh what was that like in germany did you guys have an equivalent system for math competitions there i must say that is one of the things i was always envious of eastern germany um i mean math was much more popular there and incidentally that was one of the highlights of going to eastern germany also having eastern german relatives was the math books they had so normally for birthday or christmas or so they always send math books because i mean math books were basically the only books you could actually read i mean that was it wasn&#39;t filled with propaganda and stuff i mean even in the math books i think they by law so they had to still put marks or the party in somewhere so in the beginning of a chapter sometimes they voted leaning or whatever but then these are the people&#39;s problems but uh no that was um but the books i i loved them i mean they had lots of these uh i mean like uh entertaining mathematics uh um creational mathematics and um so that was that was really great i enjoyed that and in west germany it wasn&#39;t like that so my i mean one thing i grew up with is that my mother always complained that um when when she was talking to her fellow teachers that they not only didn&#39;t know math i mean they were basically bragging about it and she said so her colleagues said i never understood math and my mother was always so upset not that they didn&#39;t understand it but that they were proud of it basically this attitude that you can can be proud of of being stupid basically or in that area and i think that was different in eastern germany so that i really regret it um but we did have competitions i mean i i did that at school for a couple of years that i think it was first a internal school thing but then i basically did solved all the problems from all i mean i think i was like in standard nine or something but i solved all of them up to standard 13 and uh then one of the teachers gave me this german national math competition thing and then later that was the same that they also had for computer science so for a couple of years i i entered that was relatively successful as well so yeah we had that but it was not as popular and not as much supported as it&#39;s in was in eastern europe so that&#39;s sort of a pity yeah and unfortunately it&#39;s not a big part of american culture as well we do have several math competitions like i remember when i was at metro state i i took the putnam i got a positive score so that&#39;s something to say but uh certainly certainly didn&#39;t get to go to harvard so i obviously wasn&#39;t a fellow i got that&#39;s a hard test too uh okay so you&#39;re finally in german university hold on right and then we&#39;re finally here you&#39;ve gone through the but actually one last church question i&#39;m sorry i have to ask this because i know you knit did you pick that up did you pick that up at the at the church that the old ladies teach you how to get i mean where did that enter your life was that later or at the church it was a bit later that okay we&#39;ll get to that we&#39;ll get to that then i just i was just curious it&#39;s like how far did the driving miss daisy experience go um okay so we&#39;re at german university you arrive your first day there uh were you still living with your parents or did you live at the university or how did that work right so earlier you asked which university it was just cologne university okay i mean that is one thing in germany i mean somehow it doesn&#39;t matter with what university you go to in germany i mean i know in the us it&#39;s very important i mean this ivy league or whether you go to harvard or to but in germany it really doesn&#39;t matter nobody gives a damn what university you go to and they&#39;re all more or less i mean obviously sometimes you have a brilliant professor somewhere or one town maybe has a reputation being particularly good for one subject but in general they&#39;re all equal quality and after you graduate nobody is interested in what university you went to which is one of the things i&#39;m very proud of in germany actually i mean it&#39;s that yeah it&#39;s it you also it&#39;s very i mean at my point time actually it was free so there was no tuition whatsoever uh i think sometimes then they reintroduced some tuition but it&#39;s something like a hundred dollars per year so so it&#39;s ridiculously low so that that i was always quite proud of that that university is more or less free i mean obviously we still have a problem that there&#39;s some imbalance between rich and poor because even if you don&#39;t have to pay for university you still have to live off something obviously you have to eat and so on so um like poor people are still disadvantaged but it&#39;s far less so than in other countries so that&#39;s actually quite cool in germany um yeah and to answer your other questions so i was the living i mean cologne and the cologne i mean it&#39;s um split into two halves by the rhine and um the the like the traditional the center is left of the rhine but i grew up right off the rhine and the universities left and so i was on the right and in the first three four years so two or three years i was living with my parents and then took the tram every morning to go back and that was actually cool because i used that time to to read all the german classics on the tram because i had always i had always assumed that if you go to german school and and graduated german school you read all the classics because i always heard my parents talk about that but we had this modern german teacher who somehow despised all the classics and believed that that is all not relevant anymore after the holocaust so we only read like very modern stuff and i&#39;ve i felt i i somehow was cheated a bit out of my classical education so then my parents had all these little reclam i don&#39;t know whether you also have them in the states um it&#39;s these tiny format books where all these plays um and so on my parents had like two racks like this of all these tiny books and they were perfect to read on the tram i mean sometimes on the tram you couldn&#39;t get the seat because it was crowded in the morning but they were perfect to put in your jacket pocket and then i could pull it out and and on my way to one from university i always read that so after two years or so i had read all the german classics at least all of those that my parents had in their bookshelf so that was cool so when you say german classics uh you know who are you referring to like 17th century 18th century something more contemporary like hans falada or um i i mean i mean obviously good and schiller i mean yeah but also a bit more modern like brest and kafka um what&#39;s that see i never had to read kafka i just lived kafka you know that&#39;s the life of being a ceo actually kafka is one of the modern german authors that i actually quite enjoy i mean it&#39;s interesting did you ever read life go ahead i mean i i really like i must say did you ever read the life of galileo from breaks actually that is the one i didn&#39;t read i think but um at school we read mother qurash and her children and then i read i mean especially as these very short stories and with only like two sentences so there&#39;s this one that what does how does it go um after you haven&#39;t changed at all the friend says said after not having seen him for a couple of years um oh i said and grew pale so that&#39;s the whole story but basically that you it is not a compliment if you don&#39;t change and here&#39;s this other cool story that i really like about um somebody that allegedly invented refrigeration so it&#39;s this english scientist but but actually he tells his mate to to take that chicken and dig a hole in the ground and then um bury the chicken and see what happens and then i think that scientist dies but the mate remembers and then eventually uh takes it out and then they see it still fresh and and then basically the moral of the story is that i mean all these famous people get credit but actually it&#39;s the little people that that do the real work and yeah breit is uh what was a hardcore communist association so he really hated capitalism especially through like the three penny opera or things like that okay so you&#39;re you&#39;re reading uh german classics on the train uh you go over did you have any hobbies when you were in college uh did sports or chess club or these types of things um i i play tennis because my parents played tennis so i also played tennis i loved skiing but obviously in cologne you couldn&#39;t ski so that was just once a year for two weeks like easter vacation swimming but nothing like nothing really interesting i mean i read a lot so and then like to program but actually i guess this is the first time you get the user like real computers because you&#39;re at a university and they have computers by that time i think i had to like ibm pc at home so yeah i mean that was actually more convenient to just use my own one than having to to fight with for for like your time share at the university computer okay i mean later we did use the mostly i mean in the early internet to to play like games so after lunch or so then we would sit a couple of friends uh sit and then and play these uh multiplayer online games some of the first ones i forgot what it was called but did you play neverwinter nights that was one of the first uh okay no it was some like flight and shoot game so you like there was gravity simulating you had your spaceship and you could shoot and everybody else was flying around and shooting at you but i never lasted very long but it was still fun so uh so you&#39;re playing video games and programming computers while studying math did the thought ever occurred you to become a game developer or did you did you say no i&#39;m just going to become a proper german mathematician somehow i felt that i had missed the timing i mean there was a time when when basically single people could could write games single-handedly and be successful but i think at that time in the 90s it was that all these big teams were creating games so i somehow felt that i mean obviously i could have joined one of those teams but no that didn&#39;t really cross my mind later i mean later i always felt that now with apps for mobile phones and so on it&#39;s a bit like in the in the good old days in the 80s again that that it&#39;s easier for um individuals to to actually produce something but they&#39;re in the 90s no that wasn&#39;t very appealing to me and i yeah i mean i i like playing games but somehow not really i never considered writing them i was just like artificial intelligence and stuff so i try to write new networks and genetic algorithms and things like that yeah i noticed there&#39;s this constant pull towards programming and computer science but then you keep trudging down the the mathematics train so you finish up at cologne and you&#39;re on graduate was in mathematics what was your favorite math course there was it analysis or a geometry course or did you take combinatorics like what did you study as an undergrad math um i mean as an undergrad it&#39;s more or less the same for everyone i mean you have some choices but everybody has to analysis and linear algebra and then i did like complex complex anal analysis and algebra and somehow i i mean i always enjoyed algebra more than analysis um i still remember at some point i mean after two years or so i became a tutor so the that was like my first proper job where actually on some money um so so the system is probably this the same in the states i suppose that every week the students get exercises and then they have to hand in the solutions the next week and then they&#39;re once a week they meet in in small groups like 20 or 30 students and then there&#39;s a tutor that goes through the exercise and they also picks students that have to present their solutions at the blackboard and then the tutor also like explains the i mean sample solutions or answers questions and so on so i did that and i started after two years or so and then did that basically for my the rest of my university career i kept doing that and um i still remember that at some point i i had a fellow tutor and um so he came from this analysis direction and i was from the algebra direction and and some of the there was this question and and amongst us tutors we wrote a sample solution so that not every tutor i had to write a sample solution for every question so we did that amongst us and um i came up with some like algebraic solution like drawing a commutative diagram so it&#39;s just a diagram and then you see that and and he i think for whatever reason he had also a solution for that and it was like lots of inequalities and and absolutely that&#39;s the difference between that analyst and algebras you guys get to draw a nonsensical picture and say hey look at this picture uh it solves the problem obviously and yeah the analyst just drinks whiskey while yelling at inequalities saying why doesn&#39;t this work at all okay so um yeah do you have to take a comprehensive exam to get into graduate school or like we have the gre in the united states what is that like in 1990s germany to get it i mean we had this special german system so we didn&#39;t have this bachelor masters thing then i think now we have it and but we had this uh what&#39;s called diplom and uh something like eight or ten semesters or five years or so and there is something in the middle after two years but that is not so that&#39;s maybe sort of comparable to a bachelor&#39;s degree but it wasn&#39;t a big thing i mean you had to pass the exam in the middle but nobody normally left university after that i mean it was just an intermediate thing so not very important what we call 40 plumes so pre-diploma so we had to pass that so it was like and that&#39;s um or it was oral examination so analysis then yeah algebra and yeah and i think you can pick something and then your minor so also computer science for me and then after those two years it just goes on but it&#39;s not such a big um interaction in the transition i mean it&#39;s basically just goes on normally so so as you transitioned into graduate study and actually doing research and and thinking about novel things uh why i might why algebraic geometry over a different field what what excited you about lgbt geometry i always wanted to ask um why not computational algebraic geometry considering that there&#39;s like so much of an overlap with computer science and the work people do um it was sort of like just luck because i wanted to do something i mean it always depends on i mean on the on the curriculum i mean the professors that want to like grow grow a group of students that can then do their diploma thesis with them they they like do a lecture series over two years or whatever with advanced stuff and so it always depends on what professor at that time um is available and what they do and i think there was only that one that they did something in the algebraic direction and i wanted to do something algebraically i didn&#39;t want to do analysis i definitely didn&#39;t want to do numerics or or something apply it so um what an apology he didn&#39;t like topology well i did but i think there was no i loved topology that actually was one of my favorite lectures ever topology that&#39;s very nice no but i i mean algebra somehow really appeal to me these diagrams and and and also i must confess because i didn&#39;t really understand it so it was like the first time in my life that i found something difficult and that hugged me and i wanted to like understand it so i it was sort of that that tried to pick the most difficult one as well um so that was all it and i mean actually it was even for me surprising that i ended up without right geometry because i never liked geometry by um i was always scared of geometry i always thought that oh no at the university if they ask me to do geometry i can&#39;t do that but algebraic geometry of course is not really geometry i mean you don&#39;t need like geometric thinking in order to do algebraic geometry so yeah and that&#39;s actually i mean it certainly helps if you have it but you don&#39;t need it so was it mostly course work at that level or were you doing actual research and reading papers reviewing things writing papers what was that like that experience i mean the the thesis the diplomas thesis is supposed to be like a little bit original but like only a little bit so in my case we have this famous german mathematician get fightings who also won the fields medal i think for the monterey conjecture and he had written this paper and that was very important but the main theorem nobody understood the proof and then my task was basically to elaborate on the proof and explain it and expand it and i ended up it was a bit embarrassing i mean it was a proof by inductions we had like three cases n equals one n equals two and then the inductive step and i think the main difficulty that people had was in the inductive step but after handling this n equals one and n equals two which in the original paper was like one paragraph or i mean like ten lines um i mean i had already written a hundred pages or so in my thesis and then my my advisor said no that&#39;s enough so let&#39;s stop there so so then i ended up basically writing about proof of the whatever conjecture in in the dimensions one and two or something but i mean it was really i mean in my offense it i mean that guy is really infamous for being obscures and and i mean it was very compressed i mean he wrote like one sentence and every single word you could write a chapter or two about making sense of that and putting that on foundations so they&#39;re like that&#39;s that&#39;s a very classic professor thing to do so i have no idea what this prominent mathematician has written hey lars can you go and do your your dissertation on explaining how his proof works that&#39;s great oh boy is he still a princeton i think i don&#39;t know honestly but i know he was there okay and i also have met him at some point um i mean not not really i mean i i as was in some of his lectures and he is an interesting person and very vicious to to critics and i mean yeah he&#39;s he&#39;s a personality as well yeah he&#39;s a brilliant guy he studied physics and math and then he just decided he wants to be a fields medalist uh yeah it takes a special type of personality to win the fields medal you have to be super competitive and publish a hell of a lot early on and usually you get some incredible major result uh and you know it&#39;s catching these guys is hard okay so uh you you write your dissertation you finally finished your phd you&#39;re like wow this is amazing i&#39;m a proper mathematician now so my understanding is of course is like a different thing right with a diploma now phd is a bit more than i mean that is a bit more original yeah yeah yeah so you get your master&#39;s thesis and then you go on you finally finish your phd but you ended up at cambridge for your postdoc so what happened there right that was um because my advisor was i mean professional friends with um tony schoyl at cambridge university so so when it was time for my post doc then uh he enabled me to to go there so that was interesting of course very fascinating to to be in that environment and um for example i met um sir peter svenaten dyer there the i mean him of the swinette and diet conjecture the millennium problem and when i um gave a presentation of my phd thesis and then afterwards the traditionally they after these presentations they all had to be in the pub so he ended up explaining to me how to to get to that pub that was quite fun i mean until that point i hadn&#39;t even known that that he&#39;s like just one person i always thought this will not die as like two people but okay so very kind so all your education was in german you lived in germany and then suddenly you&#39;re in england and you&#39;re actually you know speaking in english well how much of a shock was that to actually go from german on a daily basis to english on a daily basis well i should say that basically after school i mean obviously i learned english at school but right in the last years of school i started sort of as a hobby picking up reading english novels so i enjoyed that quite a lot and then also um like now 20 years ago i met my wife and she&#39;s south african um so we we speak like in a mixture of afrikaans uh english and german mostly english at home and that was like two years or so or one year before i went to england so at least i was used to speaking english on a daily basis um when i when i went to cambridge but it was still tough of course i mean even though my english was good it&#39;s it&#39;s still i mean in certain situations it&#39;s difficult like on the phone or if there&#39;s lots of background noise uh stuff like that i mean so it&#39;s not as if it was or very easy but but at least yeah i was used to speaking english so that the language wasn&#39;t wasn&#39;t the big problem so that was fine and then it was really nice that&#39;s good so so what was cambridge like uh to study at as a postdoc i mean for just um interesting how many people end up um i mean like spinaton dyer and then i think at that time hawking was also there stephen hawking still left and he was at the same building even though i&#39;m not sure i ever saw him i mean once i saw a guy in a wheelchair with lots of people around him so i suppose that was him but it was at least this institute the dpp ms department for pure mathematics and mathematical physics i think um this ultra modern building and it was actually like an experimental building so i believe in the office that i had the light switches for example weren&#39;t real light switches they were like just talking to a computer so everything was computerized and the the shutters at the windows were automatic and ever so so if they they had a computer problem then we couldn&#39;t switch on the lights and the windows didn&#39;t open and but yeah it was all super modern and then of course um obviously they had lots of events like um hosting conferences and then congresses and so that was very nice to be in the middle of that so what did you research when you were at cambridge focus on were you collaborating with anybody or were you working mostly solo or what was going on there yeah that was a bit weird i was actually collaborating with somebody but somebody from germany so you went to england he stayed in germany okay i didn&#39;t meet him in cambridge though at the conference and uh and then we started talking and found out that we were both interested in that and then he went back to germany but he kept elaborating and that was i mean that was now um i mean different directions so still algebraic geometry but i i we try to apply non-standard mathematics to to algebraic geometry so that was actually quite non-standard analysis or like robinson&#39;s yes exactly exactly yes so our i mean i don&#39;t know that probably goes a bit far but um i mean our or the inspiration was that i mean prime numbers are very important in in number theory obviously and with this non-standard stuff you suddenly have something like infinite prime numbers and then somehow they bridge the gap between what we call characteristic p and zero so the world of uh prime numbers and and like the normal world of real numbers and rational numbers and somehow hopefully one could use this non-standard analysis to to bridge that because there are lots of problems in mathematics that are either um solved for the one side and unknown for the other or the other very round and somewhat with non-standard methods you can build a bridge between them and some in some sense translate results from the one side to the other yeah i i have a somewhat analogous experience when i was studying mathematics is i was absolutely convinced that i could use something called quota complexes which is a topological construction to actually discuss meaningful things about these analytic number uh additive number theory problems like uh goldbach conjecture and warring hypothesis and so forth so you have this beautiful way of topologically expressing the goldbach conjecture and normally you can&#39;t do that and i was like oh cool now i can use all these topology tools to actually talk about these discrete things and perhaps we can talk about factorization in a really cool way and of course it was a road to nowhere but it was a great one year of thinking and uh not not really getting anywhere but that&#39;s the fun part about mathematics is that you you can chase something for a very long time and you never quite forget it and even if you don&#39;t get there the journey is is uh so much fun exactly actually last time sorry for interrupting but um i mean i always thought that nobody&#39;s interested in that i mean that&#39;s like an area of mathematics called model theory and that was very much out of fashion in those days so i always thought nobody ever read our papers but just now like a couple of weeks ago when i was looking into this lean theorem prover and i introduced myself on the forum that they have one guy said oh last one yes i i loved your papers on this non-standard thing and such cool work so i felt i&#39;m very pleased that after almost 20 years now uh somebody had actually read this stuff and still remembered it so that&#39;s good yeah yeah that&#39;s that&#39;s the other cool thing i think it was the one of the few people to actually even talk to the quota complex uh guys they published your paper probably in i don&#39;t know what was it 2010 2009 or something and i uh i said hey i noticed you have this great paper and i&#39;m using it for these cool problems and number of theories that&#39;s exactly why we wrote it and it&#39;s like you&#39;re the first guy to email us [Laughter] you&#39;ll find that a life of a mathematician is quite um for our audience it&#39;s quite uh isolated in many respects you end up producing lots of work that very few people read even even books like springer will ask you to write something and maybe five people will actually read the book and they they just do it because they have these great deals with libraries and they go yeah you have to buy our books so they&#39;ll sell fifty thousand copies or a hundred thousand copies of a book they have no intention for anyone to ever read um i i was talking to a computer scientist years ago um and he said well you know charles there&#39;s there&#39;s two types of code there&#39;s code that you read and write and code that you just write write only code so there&#39;s write only books and mathematics unfortunately is filled with a lot of write-only books okay so unfortunately or fortunately at least fortunate for us you left the mathematical community so you finished um at cambridge as a postdoc why didn&#39;t you go and try to pursue a professorship what was the the moment where you decided to go do something else and pursue something else i mean i actually after cambridge i still i mean i went back to rikensburg and then was here at the university for a couple of years still right and the problem somehow i i mean in in a lot of other countries i know in at least in like in england and france they do have permanent positions for mathematic or for for academics below tangier so um so you can like have a proper job that&#39;s not uh restricted um time is not restricted and then you can in i mean quietly peacefully work on your tenure but in germany we don&#39;t have that or at least we do have but but it&#39;s like very very far apart so it&#39;s not really a thing so um if you want to go this tenure track then it&#39;s it&#39;s quite risky you have to um and i mean it&#39;s expected of you to to move a lot so you spend one year here and and one year there if some professor became ill with lectures and and i mean you in the at the same time you get older and older and of course you have no guarantee that you will get tenure and i mean by that time i was 30 years already and i thought if i now need another five years to get tenure first of all i&#39;m married and i don&#39;t really want to direct my wife all over the world from university to university and secondly if it doesn&#39;t work out then i&#39;m 35 and then i have to look for a job with no experience in i mean working outside academia so then i thought maybe it&#39;s better to to like get a proper job so go ahead okay the area of mathematics that i did i mean even though i still think it&#39;s a cool idea like you with your topological idea as i said it wasn&#39;t very popular in germany at that time so there weren&#39;t many positions available for for model theory and things like that so that also didn&#39;t help you were you were a little bit ahead of your time so what constitutes a uh a proper job then you know for a uh for a brilliant mathematician who&#39;s in his 30s and wants to do something else for for james simons it was becoming a hedge fund trader with renaissance uh so what what was what was the grand idea of of dr bunyas well somehow i i mean my father had always disillusioned me by telling me that um the most difficult math he ever does at his job is like adding and subtracting or something and i didn&#39;t i mean if i could help it i didn&#39;t want to add up like that so i wanted to find something that actually has something to do with mathematics and of course i had always loved programming so so ideally also with computers so then i actually so i was looking for some thing that actually does mathematics and maybe not necessarily finance yeah i don&#39;t know it somehow didn&#39;t appeal to me that much so i did end up working for this company that did i mean actually they they had this big software speed for for paper factories but part of that speed was the um i mean these these sources when you make paper you have you start with these huge um cylinders like several tons heavy and then in the end you have like small business cards and toilet paper and i mean so you have to cut the big things into small things and by cutting um there&#39;s waste or sometimes you can&#39;t avoid waste so there&#39;s an optimization problem there and part of the software suite was this optimized paper cut optimization so how do you i mean how do you put your how do you set the knives on the machines to and in which order do you cut and how do which role do you use for what machine of which width and so on um to have as little waste as possible and things like that so that was actually mathematically quite interesting so you went full circle you went back to the church basement with the with the printing press only this time you&#39;re you&#39;re optimizing paper did you did you get into origami at all i have to ask if you&#39;re doing careful no no i don&#39;t although it does sound appealing maybe i should look at it yeah okay so you start working at this software company and what was the transition from being in academia because that was the dominant force of your life you were always at a university working academic hours to suddenly now working full-time for uh an actual company and you have to get up in the morning and you have to actually show up on time and work nine to five what was that transition like actually i mean yeah the first week or two was a bit bad i suppose but it was much much easier than i thought i mean i also the my closest colleague also um i mean was also a mathematician and he also i mean also at ringsbrook university so um i mean and he was a very gentle person so that was very nice i mean of course i also had this colleague this old mathematician close to retirement who i mean knew everything and so he was a bit of a of a bother with the new upshots but um anyway so actually it was fine and i basically set my mark quite early at some point i got this task to to do something simple and then i solved it in a way that the colleagues hadn&#39;t expected so instead i mean i basically they thought um i mean whatever i basically didn&#39;t do what they said i just abstracted it away and made it much simpler and and uh and i had a very simple model and then i implemented everything in that model so i had a solution very quickly uh didn&#39;t have to bother putting it in the in the real system and could try it out and test it with just in this abstraction basically and that really impressed my my colleagues because they wouldn&#39;t have done it like that and from then on it was like smooth sailing so uh you got hazed by the other mathematicians for a while until you found a creative solution they say okay he&#39;s a cool guy he knows what he&#39;s doing well uh well welcome into the family so did you work continuously at the uh at the at the paper software company uh or did you kind of jump around the industrial world or what was your career like i mean i must i should also mention that in germany we are still quite traditional so i grew up that i mean by default you i mean you never change jobs i mean you you start working for a company and then you make your career i mean you climb the career ladder there and then you retire at that company i mean obviously sometimes people do but i mean by default i mean that&#39;s like the sort of ideal i grew up with so i didn&#39;t have this urge to to change shops or every two years or so so as long as it it was fine then i had and i was happy there i i saw no need to to change um and it was actually became quite interesting because by sheer luck because one morning this this older colleague um even though he was supposed to be there he wasn&#39;t so a phone call that was meant for him came to me and i mean it was actually a big big company so this paper thing was only a small department so um so that came from a different department they are asked for help and they had actually not paper cuttings on a wood cutting client and they to know whether we can do something there and uh because i now ended up um answering for that i i was the one that then had this case and and i got involved and then um they needed a prototype that so that was like a different type of saw much more interesting mathematically as well so i ended up writing this you upgraded from flat paper to three-dimensional objects yeah the point is with this paper it&#39;s basically in one dimensional problem because it&#39;s just rolls and you just set the knife so you can just set the knife in one direction but this wood cutting thing they were that was wood wooden boards and um so that saw you could like it was two two dimensional like a puzzle so that was actually really more interesting so i ended up writing a prototype for them which basically got us this contract was a several million dollar contract um so because they were very impressed that that uh we could do that this this optimization part and that was interesting for me because then for for reasons i mean to save costs we wanted to do the bulk of the development in india because we had like also departments in india so that&#39;s how i ended up in india which was like quite important for for me we&#39;re we&#39;re going to get to india but i just i i just have to to point out this contrast i love how you say germany is behind but they&#39;re literally hiring a theoretical mathematician to figure out how to cut wood i mean that&#39;s pretty that&#39;s pretty rigorous there okay all right so you&#39;re working for this company uh you&#39;ve done the transition from theory to applied you&#39;re actually working on really interesting problems and then they say large you have to go to india and they say okay so what happened there well i assume this is the first time you&#39;ve ever been to india yes exactly and how old were you at the time where like 35 36 right that was like 10 years ago now yeah more like yeah 38 or something i mean i&#39;m turning 50 this year so probably i was like 40. so yeah i&#39;m i&#39;m probably one of the oldest guys at irg i&#39;m a fred no no no we got waddler we got we got a few few others you&#39;re okay so so you you end up going to indy did you take the wife along or did you just go solo or how did that work later i mean i ended up going there often and at some point my wife also visited me for a couple of weeks but that time the first time it was just me and two colleagues i think for two weeks and yeah it went very well so i mean i&#39;m still grateful to that company even though i mean there are lots of frustration lots of things i was unhappy about at that job but that part i&#39;m still grateful that they sort of sent me to india and uh that was really a very um profound experience for me so yeah and that&#39;s this is going to be the fun part i will be talking about all the different places you&#39;ve lived now the places you&#39;ve been but india is uh what was india like for you did you have a driver did they have a cook for you what was did you just have to figure this all out yourself i mean what was that experience like um they did pick i mean it started i mean we landed in mumbai but the the company was in tune which is like 200 kilometers from mumbai so we landed in the middle of the night the company had sent a car and then in the night we were driving from mumbai to pune so i got my very first impression after 12 hours flight or whatever and that was already uh i mean mind boggling i found there i mean it it&#39;s actually quite i mean the even though it&#39;s i think it&#39;s like 10 kilometers to leave mumbai and then another 10 kilometers once you reach pune to get to the hotel and the rest is is a motorway but basically the bike of the drive even in the middle of the night was just to get out of mumbai and then later to enter pune so i mean the traffic in in in the city is just crazy but this motorway was also crazy because at some point there&#39;s this hill and it&#39;s three lanes each direction and for whatever reason then the truck drivers just decide to to sleep for the night there on one of the three lanes i mean no matter which one so it was really it really felt like a video game um i mean the trucks on all three lanes and and everybody is weaving around them and passed them and it was i mean crazy for me i mean i&#39;d never for german used to following the rules i used to live in jakarta and i remember his traffic is so destroyingly bad and uh in jakarta it&#39;s so destroyed it just is horrendous so eventually i bought a motorcycle because i was like this this is this is going to solve all of my problems and i and i wrecked it three times in four months uh but yeah you know ducati is a lifestyle uh yeah and you that&#39;s one of the things the biggest transitions you&#39;ll notice i think going from europe or north america to asia is just how traffic is radically different and how lights are optional lanes are optional and um you just whatever goes and whoever&#39;s got the biggest vehicle the largest horn uh tends to tends to win okay so how long were you in india for i mean that time only two weeks or so but um in in total i think i&#39;m not completely sure about something like eight months or so okay i mean i i had two very long stints that were two months three months and then a couple of times two or three weeks each but um yes i i and i really love india i mean i love the food and i love the people it&#39;s it&#39;s fascinating place right did you ever while you&#39;re there did you ever look into vedic math or any of the the historical math that india did no i didn&#39;t but i did uh do yoga classes with uh with uh i can&#39;t i cannot see you doing yoga lars i&#39;m sorry it&#39;s just not not a reality i live in yeah yeah i know and i mean it was very embarrassing because because because at the end of the course i mean the structures couldn&#39;t even speak english so they&#39;re instructed in hindi and then somebody some other colleague translated to me and and at the end the instructors came over and and basically told me how impressed they were i mean they said it&#39;s so amazing that somebody with a body like yours [Laughter] tries this class okay so you&#39;re in india you&#39;re learning these things you&#39;re working on three-dimensional wood cutting and and they tell you hey if you get your 20 you can do hyper trees you know if you go first to four dimensional trees or something like that but maybe that doesn&#39;t work so well so why why did you want to leave and come work for a crazy guy like me what was the what was the the moment you decided that you needed a career change because as you mentioned people tend to stay for long periods of time at their companies so what was the frustration that kind of pushed you in that direction i actually know precisely what moment it was um because i mean i had like first come into contact with haskell during my cambridge time just another colleague he made me aware of it so so i had done haskell on it off since then and also other programming languages so so i always loved experimenting with programming languages but at some point i settled on haskell and decided haskell is now because i thought if you really want to be really good at something you should concentrate on that one thing and try to really deepen it so anyway so i was very interested in haskell and i mean but at that job we did dot net c sharp but the dot net also has a functional languages f sharp um so so and some of the problems we had i mean they could be done or sold very nicely and much nicer in f sharp and c sharp so um i think twice or three times i try to convince my managers that that would i mean we should do that and that would be a good idea but of course got shut down any any time so that was already frustrating but um the i mean the the biggest thing was so i became more and more interested in haskell and then i got this invitation to to a haskell conference um the the haskell exchange in london to to present there on something i had done with new networks so i go to my manager and tell him about it and he says yeah and so what and i said yeah well are you sending me i mean do i get that off and are you paying for the flight and because i assumed that it&#39;s a matter of i mean i mean that they can be proud of if an employee right gets invited to a to a talk uh but i mean they said but it has nothing to do with your work and why would we pay for it and no and i mean it was and not even i mean it was just they total i mean total blank i mean they had no no idea why i would even consider that they should get involved in that and that was the moment for me where i decided that it&#39;s time for me to go somewhere else that was the uh the milton stapler moment they they took the stapler and you had to move on yeah so so uh obviously we&#39;re we were a haskell shop but there were many others like well type and tweak and so forth so what was appealing about um the job offer we had for iohk because i think you came out the first time i met you was in malta i believe yes yes what was that 2016 or 2017 i can&#39;t remember but i joined in november 16 okay okay so what was appealing about iohk um i mean first of all of course haskell but um i mean i must say even though probably i shouldn&#39;t it wasn&#39;t so much the blockchain thing i mean not that i don&#39;t think it was interesting but uh i i hadn&#39;t been a crypto like fanatic or enthusiast before even though i had heard about bitcoin and read a bit about it but it was mostly i mean the science in general because i i thought it was so amazing that there&#39;s a company that actually takes the the science and the research series um and and uses haskell uh i thought that was was so nice especially in i mean with my background coming from this company where they do the same thing for 20 years and totally resistant to change and then the company actually i mean like academics and scientists are actually valued and where the company is basically built on them i thought that was fascinating and i thought it was really a brave um to to do something as big as that in haskell so i also admired the well you know i would i was in a really difficult position when we were trying to figure out how to actually implement these protocols so we knew that if we were choosing this academic peer-reviewed you know philosophy we would run into a situation where we output proper science papers and so those papers are are not easy to read i mean if you look at the ore boris paper or any of the things the core papers of cardano we were left in a situation where normal engineers would struggle like if i one hired a python engineer or a javascript engineer so i was thinking okay well what type of engineer can i hire who can actually read alkalosis papers can actually understand the sites interact with these guys i said all right well you know maybe the dependently type crowd the formal methods crowd these these guys they&#39;re pretty serious and that&#39;s a good bridge the problem is most of those languages are just to your point ambitious you you&#39;re a little crazy if you go and try to build a production system that works on windows with idris or acta or isabel and so i said well maybe maybe haskell makes sense you know i and i&#39;d read real world haskell and i and it convinced me and i wish i had never read that book because it wasn&#39;t true that that haskell was the perfect language now for industrial uh work and you could definitely go and write real applications and build real things and it was really an o chemical versus haskell thing i said well i don&#39;t like the french so i don&#39;t want to deal with them all day long uh you know i&#39;m kidding uh so uh let&#39;s let&#39;s do this haskell thing and it&#39;s gonna be super easy we&#39;re gonna hire these great phds who are just like in love with caskel and everything&#39;s just gonna work we can use quick check you know it&#39;s gonna it&#39;s just all gonna come together and in six months we&#39;ll have this beautiful code base and so the other deciding factor was um we look for an implementation of bitcoin in haskell and there was one uh that was called hasscoin so i looked through it and i said oh okay yeah you can do proof of work and haskell and you know it&#39;s a it&#39;s a very sensible system uh so we should definitely be able to build cryptocurrency and get this thing to work i think that was now like five years ago and uh i&#39;ve gained a lot of weight the beer the beer&#39;s gotten very white we we&#39;ve certainly learned a lot along the way and we&#39;ve turned haskell into at least for us as a development company a very good language to do the things that we do but it&#39;s been it&#39;s been brutal absolutely brutal so i i believe when you came on in november of 2016 um you were uh originally hired as a developer but very quickly we decided to put you into the the education side of things so can you talk a little bit about the initial code you were writing and then your kind of rough transition into uh director of education right i mean i started working just i mean when i started it was just thrown into i mean those days we didn&#39;t have like onboarding processes and stuff so you just sent me some papers i was supposed to read and i had to do this bitcoin course or blockchain course and coursera and then i started coding on the node i mean the old serial kill node um something some and then after i mean that was only i mean as i said it was only part-time at that point because i couldn&#39;t get out of my own shop until march 2017 and that was malta so um and then i met duncan and philip there and then i started doing like more interesting things i don&#39;t actually recall precisely but i was like in in this formal methods direction modeling things and but then very soon the idea came up to to do a haskell course in in athens and uh you were looking for volunteers that are willing to teach that and i mean that i haven&#39;t mentioned before but the one thing that i missed most after leaving university was actually that i couldn&#39;t teach anymore and that was also one of the reasons i loved india so much because there and the team was very young and um there i had these moments where i could like tell them stuff and teach them and and that was made me so happy somewhere it was such a i mean warming feeling to to be able to do so i realized how much i had missed that so i jumped on the opportunity um when it presented itself uh to do this haskell course in essence yeah and that&#39;s probably the best place in the world to go and spend two or three months teaching haskell to people you know greece is just an incredible country and food is so good so yeah for the audience&#39;s benefit um one of the initiatives that we started very early on as a company is developer training and the idea was that we&#39;d go to a country uh we&#39;d work with a local university in the case of greece i believe it was ntu and university of athens and nicos was the one who helped us source those students uh and basically we get the best and brightest usually 20-something recently got their degree in compsci or math or something i and then we&#39;d go and beat the hell out of them for three months and see if they could pass the the course um and the course we did in greece was the first then we did one of barbados then we did one in ethiopia and then we did one in mongolia and mongolia was the only remote one because of corona but how large was the class in greece i think it was only like 10 students or something yeah eight or so it was quite small in greece yes yeah and so what was that like to go back to being professor bunyas after all this time off uh and teaching a haskell class of all things at greece what what did you like what did you not like what did you learn from that experience um i mean it was great because i really love teaching i definitely don&#39;t like grading so i was very glad that now in the recent courses i had some other poor soul that had to do the grading for me but in athens i did a lot of grading and even though it&#39;s only 10 people it takes a lot of time and um no it was really great also i mean very rewarding afterwards i mean i didn&#39;t i was quite nervous because i mean haskell i&#39;d never studied haskell officially and um and then particularly i&#39;d never taught it obviously um so i wasn&#39;t really sure how well i would be doing but i got very nice feedback from the students and most of them almost all of them turned out to be very very good and i mean of course i didn&#39;t do the course alone i mean we would have understood from very tired but but still i mean it was at least partially my my doing so so i was very pleased to see that not only do i enjoy it i also seem to be quite good at it and i mean that was nice and and for the audience&#39;s benefit can you kind of take uh take them through how how these classes are structured and what we cover and so forth right i mean one of the problems with haskell is that it&#39;s very difficult to find advanced textbooks i mean there are lots of nice beginners books out there but for for advanced material i mean you end up reading scientific papers or blog posts and stuff and then so i believe one our course is one of the very few where it&#39;s really goes very deep in like a structured comprehensive manner so so the courses as i said i think it was 10 weeks it&#39;s almost more or less 10 weeks and it&#39;s like a full-time full-time course so lectures in the mornings we experimented a bit at later course we only had like uh lectures on three three days a week and then the other two days like exercises and stuff but anyway it&#39;s i mean basically a full-time course so they have the lecturers in the mornings then they have exercises that they have to do at home so it&#39;s very tough it&#39;s very demanding for them and that for for 10 weeks and we really start at the very beginning so in principle you wouldn&#39;t even need to know how to program although it&#39;s probably helpful if you do and i mean start from the very beginning and but then go much deeper than any of the standard textbooks beginners textbooks go so also like practical stuff and from the beginning i think it was always called haskell and cryptocurrencies so the idea was always to uh do a haskell course but also i mean geared towards cryptocurrency so we always pick our examples um from the cryptocurrency world so the projects they do is like writing a bitcoin client or writing a peer-to-peer um protocol and uh transaction validation and things like that and so it&#39;s very practical and um i mean we also do theoretical stuff and monarchs the infamous monarchs and and other things but also very practical network i mean mostly networking and uh parallelism and concurrency and and those things so i think it&#39;s a very nice mixture between between prayer um down to earth practically useful libraries and techniques and and the theory also i mean we go quite theoretical from lambda calculus different flavors of lambda characters all the way to like networking and applying it to blockchain and that for 10 weeks every day so it&#39;s very tough but afterwards it&#39;s i mean you really have a very found solid foundation and has gotten much more than just an introductory course so uh most of the people who take these courses they start in the imperative world and they write java and python and c and they they haven&#39;t done much functional programming so what is that transition like for a lot of these developers as they&#39;re trying to wrap their head around functional programming what have you noticed have been the biggest stumbling blocks and aha moments i mean as we say i mean that is very unusual in haskell that it&#39;s not imperative and of course the side effects so i mean once they they grasp that i mean i don&#39;t know whether it&#39;s really i mean it&#39;s many different moments of course but um i mean to to get this different way of thinking which is also one of the things that the students always appreciate afterwards that they got this completely new perspective because right having to to think functional even if afterwards you don&#39;t work as a haskell developer it still gives you a totally uh new perspective on thinking about problems and i think once they figure that out that i mean it&#39;s very enriching for them right so concepts like recursion suddenly actually makes sense in levels that people hadn&#39;t realized before exactly right uh what about introducing the monad that&#39;s uh that&#39;s kind of like the crown jewel of haskell right so so what have you noticed there the the pros and cons of that those concepts what what have students struggled with i think that did go down surprisingly well i mean we try to i mean do that motivated with lots of examples so i mean before we even use the m word we just show that i mean in this situation with maybe uh if i mean if you have state or if if you have the possibility of error if you have io then it always leads to similar ugly patterns and and you always have similar solutions to to to make that nicer if you introduce some higher level abstractions and then it falls quite natural that um i mean to to abstract that abstraction and give it a name and the name is monarch so uh actually i think that wasn&#39;t too bad for them uh to learn that and um i mean there&#39;s this very i mean i think on barbados that was very popular this lecture where we basically start very simple with with some pure expression where you can just have variables and can add them and and nothing nothing else and then we add feature after feature like division where suddenly you could divide by zero so there could be errors or where you have variables that have a predefined value or maybe that later you can assign values and each additional feature requires basically that you switch the monad and if you do that right you have to change very little code because the the monad is so abstract that most of the code can this day stay the same and just by adding a new feature you you have to slightly tweak your monad replace it by a different one but it&#39;s all very logical and very nice and and that is a i think a very um popular lecture it&#39;s also most fun one uh to teach actually of of the course we have so i mean we try of course to to to motivate it with lots of examples where where these abstractions come from right and in later courses especially as uh we moved to mongolia we started having a a heavier plutus emphasis and so can you kind of compare and contrast pollutus to haskell what what&#39;s what&#39;s different and what&#39;s the same i mean pluto&#39;s is haskell sort of i mean it&#39;s just i mean pluto&#39;s script is i mean pluto script is its own language but uh you take haskell and it gets compiled to pluto script so in principle it&#39;s just haskell um so so yeah i mean of course independent from orthogonal to that is this extended utxo model so how do you have to think about the the contracts how it actually works i mean that is what i would call pluto&#39;s i mean that&#39;s a different story and i mean that that you could do in in principle i mean it wouldn&#39;t have to be haskell you could have done pluto&#39;s in in python or whatever but i think that is if you want to understand pluto that&#39;s the main thing you have to understand this extended utex or model how what it actually means a smart contract in this context what the validator is and so this thinking in in in transactions with inputs and outputs and what what properties the in the transaction has to have to uh to be allowed to consume input i mean that you have to understand that&#39;s the first step or the most important step and then of course you have to somehow express that in haskell right so let&#39;s actually go into a practical example there so for example uh the show we did last week uh you guys showed off uh a dex that you wrote in plutus so how does one go about building something like that let&#39;s say there&#39;s a developer listening and they say hey i want to write a pollutus application and these test nuts are coming soon uh how should they go about approaching let&#39;s say a dex or a stablecoin or a project like that with the extended utxo model with plutus i mean i just i mean before you you you worry about clues itself you must just translate the concept into into the extended utxo model i mean because things are different there so i thought i mean how can i represent a liquidity pool i mean what should that be and then of course you play in your mind with it so i thought okay fine i i have this special script address that&#39;s now the liquidity pool and there are these two liquidities of the different tokens in there and now what i mean what should you be able to do with it you should be able to swap so you need a special i mean um way to to unlock the liquidity in there and swap and then okay what what should the conditions be and that&#39;s then the same as in in the white paper of universe i mean there&#39;s just a mathematical formula what happens when you do these swaps and then i mean what else do you want to do if maybe somebody wants to add liquidity or remove liquidity so you i mean and is that still possible could i do it like that what else do i need this one script that is really enough do i need to what data do i have to basically what bookkeeping do i need i mean it&#39;s just and i mean it&#39;s normally not a linear pro process i mean you have some model in your mind and you see whether you can do what you want to do then you see you can&#39;t so you go back and tweak something and but i mean that&#39;s basically the same everywhere when you write software so it&#39;s this back and forth in your mind and then at some point you&#39;re confident enough that it should work and then you can try to write it down in code and of course the order doesn&#39;t have to be like that you can also start with some code and uh write some functionality and later rewrite it and yeah so so how long did it take you to design that unit swap clone i would say a week but i mean mostly like in the evenings it wasn&#39;t i mean my main problem was like because i also had to learn pluto and pluto&#39;s is changing so rapidly that even though i wrote a book about it two years ago i wrote a book about it but i have no idea how it works they changed a lot in the meantime and so and it&#39;s just very big and i mean there are lots of um libraries and i mean just things you have to look up and get the names right and the signatures right and so that i mean this whole just setting up the infrastructure and i mean that was most of the time but then yeah a couple of evenings took me it wasn&#39;t too bad that&#39;s great that&#39;s absolutely great okay so let&#39;s talk about living in ethiopia so that&#39;s probably the most difficult of all the courses that you had to teach i call you up and i say lars we&#39;re doing our next class in ethiopia go talk to john figure it out uh so what happened next well luckily not much because that i mean it took a long time i think from i mean you first told me about ethiopia when you visited the course in on barbados yeah and and it was still a year exactly a year basically until ethiopia happened so at least i had a little uh time to to adjust mentally to that because i mean arrangements took time and picking students took time and but actually i mean i i really like the ethiopia of course so yeah so let&#39;s go to the first day you&#39;re you&#39;re flying did you fly ethiopia or how did you get into the country okay did you fly direct from germany to ethiopia or how did you get there yeah from frankfurt so i had to munich frankfurt frankfurt others okay that wasn&#39;t too bad so um because john was picking me up john and his driver were picking me up at the airport so i just had to somehow find the exit which was a bit of a problem because it seems there are two and if somehow they want me if i take the wrong one then i&#39;m lost forever but i&#39;ve i found the right one and of course it was i mean problem with visa and so on it was a bit difficult because uh i think i had to get a visa there so there was this very long queue and i mean it&#39;s always a bit unpleasant when you&#39;re tired and and you arrive at the country where you&#39;ve never been and then you first have to you&#39;re worried that they will send you back or some paperwork&#39;s not in order but that was all fine and then john met me there and the driver and took me to the hotel and i had a beer or two and so i was good so what hotel did you stay at oh that actually originally somehow john thought that i was like a very important person so he wanted to park me in some five-star hotel uh but then he wanted to park my my assistant teaching assistant polina in this french boutique hotel and then i said no but that&#39;s horrible i mean we must be in the same um same hotel otherwise i mean we want to like plan lectures and stuff so it&#39;s if you&#39;re in different hotels they said yeah but he can&#39;t afford to sit pullina into the five-star tenant i said that&#39;s fine i go to that and he said oh that&#39;s good because it&#39;s so much more fun anyway it&#39;s all this lively crowd and so it was this french guy who for whatever reason ended up in addis ababa having this little small hotel with 20 rooms or so and um it seems every foreigner living in in ethiopia or in at least nothing at least once a week visited that hotel so it seemed to be very popular pub spot and so it was fun so you got some french cheeses and stuff on the menu as well and this lovely backyard um i could sit outside and so it was quite nice i mean not the most luxurious hotel i&#39;ve ever been but totally adequate very nice okay and it was john living there at the same time he had used to live in the hotel but a couple of weeks before we arrived i think he got his own house so he but he was a frequent guest because all his friends used to meet there so so i i saw john often at that hotel and what was the thing that surprised you the most about living in ethiopia i mean one thing i hadn&#39;t realized was the elevation that it&#39;s 2700 meters high i think so it&#39;s like i mean somehow i had expected if i go to africa it will be hot but i was freezing my butt off actually i mean not all the time it was fine but it was a surprisingly cold and and of course i was permanently out of breath because of the elevation that says if you&#39;re permanently running or something so that was unexpected and i don&#39;t know the i think i also didn&#39;t expect how religious the the people are so i think the very first thing one of my students ever asked me was whether i&#39;ve heard of jesus you&#39;re like yes i worked at his place i was a gardener and it was uh an all-women&#39;s class too that was the first time we ever the the education minister requested it and we had um i think 17 or 18 from ethiopia and four or five from uganda if i got that position right yes yes that was great i think that was a wonderful idea to do that and uh also very successful and um just to come back to india briefly one of the things i really find amazing about india is that um the women in it it&#39;s almost 50 50 and also in management i mean in some sense india is still very traditional i mean very hierarchical arranged marriages and so on but in that regard india is very progressive um and i&#39;m germany for example is not i mean in india there are far more women in in i.t than in in in germany so yeah i really enjoyed doing this all women class in ethiopia that was very nice and and what was that like to teach in a woman&#39;s class especially when there&#39;s such a strong gender and balance in technology in africa were were they shy i mean how did they find their voice in that process yeah i think they were shy but i&#39;m not sure that had to do with them being women i think it&#39;s more the education system in general that it&#39;s more like authoritarian that they are not supposed to ask so many questions i don&#39;t know i i i it sounds silly but i like um i mean teaching women i get a long way with women somehow i think it&#39;s i don&#39;t know i don&#39;t think that was an issue that they were shy or so i hope not but uh i mean at least uh later i mean they were definitely i mean asked lots of questions and uh i think they were fine with being taught by men and of course we had polina um with so i was it was not just all male teachers so that was also a good idea we&#39;re definitely going to have polina on uh people of iog and we&#39;ll get her side of the ethiopia story but from your side what uh what was it like working with polina she&#39;s also a mathematician who works with us yes that was cool that was also something that can only happen at iog that i think by the time ethiopia happened she had been working for us for almost a year but i and john and i were the very first people she ever met in person working for ig so i mean that&#39;s something that doesn&#39;t happen in many companies that you can work there for a year and then only after a year me meet somebody in person so she told me that her mother was always very skeptical is that company for real are you sure you&#39;re real people [Laughter] we assure you we&#39;re real people we&#39;re not just a bunch of dogs in a trench coat yeah okay so two to three months uh training these ethiopian girls and uh actually it was a very diverse class and i think one of them had a uh either a phd or a master&#39;s in artificial intelligence which really surprised me right yes and i&#39;m not sure whether that was the same one but one was also a college professor i believe yeah and i think one of them worked for uh i can&#39;t remember her name for ben ben gortzel with singularitynet okay yeah yeah because ben mentioned that to me when i was in wyoming with him that that we in fact were now sharing an office with uh singularity that they have one in edison it&#39;s we decide if we pool resources we can get a really beautiful office and john likes beautiful offices so he&#39;s he he fought very hard to find a way to make that happen um i came for the graduation uh as did professor wadler and that was really an amazing event i remember it was catered and everybody got a certificate and the minister of education spoke and so forth and we hired several of the graduates i think maybe we hired four or five i can&#39;t remember i think at least five mm-hmm yeah um so that&#39;s that&#39;s ethiopia haskell edition and actually we&#39;re just about to do another african class we&#39;re in the early days of uh teaching a class in ghana uh and like barbados to ethiopia that&#39;s probably going to be about six months to a year in the in the works but hopefully we can do that in person i can i can send you to ghana you can see accra it&#39;s it&#39;s a radically different place from ethiopia uh quite fun okay so uh you also uh while you do the educational initiatives do research and uh one thing we haven&#39;t discussed is your collaboration with uh professor kosupus over at oxford and the game theory and economics work that you do so let&#39;s talk about that so uh and the stake pool operators will be probably super interested in this because you&#39;re one of the guys that&#39;s actually thinking about these very topics yes so uh yeah i i mean i love teaching but i i mean you can&#39;t only teach i feel i mean you at some point i mean first of all you should also know what you&#39;re doing and and um i mean practice i mean in my case i mean if i teach headscare i should also write haskell of course and besides i mean there are only that many has good classes so um and i&#39;m i love mathematics of course and so i always wanted to do like not exclusively teaching and so one of the things you asked me to do like three years ago when now i don&#39;t know exactly was to think about how to do incentives in in proof of stake system or in cardano and uh so i started um and we had hired uh elias uh as a game theorist at oxford and then um he and i and aguelos and katarina started thinking about how to send set up an incentive system for cardano that avoids the problems that bitcoin for example has of pulling i mean leading to pools that are too large and too powerful so we came up with the system that we are deploying now and that so far doesn&#39;t i mean does well i think i mean it&#39;s not maybe not ideal and we are permanently discussing how to tweak it to make it better but in general i mean at least in principle it works we have a thousand pools and not no pool is too big and everybody gets staking rewards so so it&#39;s actually quite proud of that that uh that turned out so nicely and it&#39;s it&#39;s cool to i mean to start thinking about something on a piece of paper and discussing it i think you and i also discussed it from uh obama champagne one evening yeah we were at perkins eating pie and we did have so we did have some discussions that was when we were visiting gregory at uh university of illinois in europe that&#39;s right yeah so it&#39;s nice from such humble starts to to actually see it deployed and and i mean hundreds of people actually making a living of of the outcome of that incentive system and um so well you know when you start doing interdisciplinary academic work there&#39;s always a difference in culture between each academic domain so i imagine this was the first time you&#39;ve done game theory and mechanism design research right so what was the difference working with a game theorist as opposed to collaborating with mathematicians i i&#39;m not so sure that i think it&#39;s more a matter of personality maybe in this case and elias is just a super super nice and patient person so um very humble and and very bright so i didn&#39;t really notice any i mean that was not a culture shock or shock or anything i mean and then i mean we just started very simple so just asking simple questions i mean what do we actually want to achieve and and what&#39;s the easiest function we could do and and can we get away with that and so i mean we basically eased into the problem and of course i also mostly concentrated um on on the simulation part so so i could write fun haskell programs actually trying our mechanism and simulating it to to to see whether the the nash equilibria and so on that we can come up with actually are achievable in practice and so yeah and uh around the same time you started doing the game theory research i also remember i sent you to um university of oregon uh with colin and you guys got a crash course in and a crash course and uh formal methods and so you want to talk a little bit about that yeah that was that was really nice as well um i mean first of all oregon had never been on the west coast i think the first had ever gotten until that point was like texas um furthest west so so oregon was very nice and it was this two-week summer school i think it&#39;s it&#39;s traditional and it&#39;s every year uh two two weeks a type theory something related so the famous type theorist bob harper for example teaching there and you sent me and i think jake back in the days when he was still doing devops yeah and then covering the guy and uh to to learn something about type theory there and that was really nice i mean there all these bright young people coming together so um i learned a lot and i mean i i had never had a formal education i mean obviously i&#39;d read a couple of papers over the years but i didn&#39;t have a formal background type theory but afterwards and especially being taught by the masters like bob harper that i mean it&#39;s very cool and it was a lot of fun and i learned a lot about lambda calculus and gradual typing and depending uh dependent typing and it was lots of fun it was uh was edwin brady there i think it was exactly i just want to say that was i think for me the most fun actually so i also wrote some idris software and some homework and that was really nice it&#39;s a nice mixture of i mean it was like touristy in a sense for me i mean we also on the weekend in between uh we did this recursion to the pacific ocean and these dunes and very pretty and then of course uh i mean in the evenings was nice talking with the others and but also learned a lot so it&#39;s a perfect environment for i mean very stimulating i found very nice two weeks and uh totally um i it was the first american city i&#39;ve town i&#39;ve ever been to where you can actually walk or where people other people actually walk so i mean they it seems there in eugene it&#39;s a thing to to walk i mean that was also new for me it was a nice surprise it keeps you healthy it&#39;s the same in boulder everybody has to do outdoor activity if you you have to own a mountain bike and you have to hike these things and actually i think this is the you&#39;re one of the few people in the company that&#39;s met collin in person uh so cohen uh there&#39;s a story behind that so i i wanted to do something with lawrence paulson uh and lawrence is a very famous computer scientist over at uh cambridge and he invented isabelle and i called up lawrence and i said lawrence um uh you know we need to do some form of a collaboration and he said well i&#39;m really busy but i tell you what if you uh pay for a graduate student i&#39;ll mentor them and put them on something interesting and i said okay do you have any candidates he said well there&#39;s this this kid named collin and i think he&#39;s from thailand and uh and yeah if you pay for his phd you know we&#39;ll we&#39;ll we&#39;ll do something cool together i said a cambridge phd is pretty expensive he said well you know you got to pay to play i&#39;m lawrence i said okay lawrence so i i caved after thinking about it for a month and i ended up subsidizing cohen&#39;s phd so he got to go to cambridge and they asked well what is he going to work on i said well why don&#39;t you formalize uh warb wars you know that forkable string theory we have there is is really cool stuff and that that seems like a really nice sexy isabelle problem to go and do and this poor kid he he kind of got lost in the bureaucracy of of io global and uh and cambridge and so he just went off the mountaintop and wrote tens of thousands of lines of isabel code and systematically formalized all of war of wars uh and none of the researchers were really paying much attention or aware that he was doing this and every six months to a year right i&#39;d call up aguilas and say hey you should probably talk to colleen if you&#39;re rewriting the ord words paper because uh yeah he spent the last two years at cambridge you know like writing very rigorous proofs about this and maybe it&#39;s a good idea to keep them in the loop about what you guys are doing so i felt so bad about it that i i i said well we need to do something nice for him and i asked him if he wanted to go to um to oregon then that&#39;s why we sent him there but uh i think he may have actually finished his phd now it&#39;s one of those guys i i only see him once every year to two years and he just he&#39;s like uh he&#39;s like the groundhog that comes and if he sees his own shadow we have another six months of isabel work to do oh man all right so let&#39;s talk about the future so there&#39;s kind of uh two threads that you work on there&#39;s more game theoretic research uh because obviously the stake pool model is improving and now we have pollutus pioneers so let&#39;s start let&#39;s start with game theory what&#39;s next on the state pool side and the economic side and transaction fees and all kinds of things do you do you and elias have any other uh projects in the queue i mean there&#39;s always things one one can think about i mean right now we&#39;re still busy tweaking the the reward function because there i mean like certain object certain observations we have from our stakeholders that like for example it&#39;s difficult for a small pool to to attract um irrigation or that some large pools find it better to like split their their pledge and and create several pools which should i mean we actually wanted to avoid and things like that so they&#39;re in that regard there&#39;s there&#39;s lots to do still and then of course there are all sorts of things like for example now that um ada appreciated so much um the transaction fees also uh increased because they are paid in in ada and i mean we could of course change the protocol parameters and and lower that but i mean that&#39;s a manual thing so there are also certain ideas how one i mean could automate that so that it&#39;s either via stablecoin or some other mechanism that that automatically adjusts the fees and and now of course with pluto&#39;s um there are even more fees because now the pluto scripts also have like uh operational fees um so that becomes even more important so in that regard there there are lots of interesting questions that one can ask am i kind of of course also make the models um more interesting i mean um i mean we try to keep it simple in the beginning but but you can add more stuff like opportunity loss if somebody runs a staple he can&#39;t take the same money and put it on his bank account or buy a stock or something so you can take start taking things like that into account and much make it more and more realistic and so yeah i think there&#39;s plenty to do for the next decades to improve the models yeah it&#39;s going to be a lot of fun i mean it&#39;s a big priority of ours to think about dynamic feed pricing dynamic resource consumption and resource modeling and just determinism of resource modeling i remember looking at raml and these these other models out of cmu just to see can you how much can you prove up front what do you know on the back end it&#39;s it&#39;s a really devil of a problem especially if you want to use alternative field models and this is one of the things we&#39;re exploring right now with side chains but let&#39;s go to the really sexy exciting thing plutus pioneers i think this is probably going to be the largest class you&#39;ve ever taught probably the most intensive class you&#39;ve ever taught there there&#39;s over 1300 developers who&#39;ve expressed interest i mean how how the hell do you teach a class of that size and scale as you said i&#39;ve never done it but um yeah we do our best of course so um obviously unfortunately i can&#39;t like help every single one of the students every time so our idea is that i mean we will have a big forum and encourage the students to i mean ask questions and and help each other and of course we will also monitor it and i mean see whether there are some questions that a lot of students have or some topics that are heatedly discussed and then jump in um so yeah we do our best and uh i mean it&#39;s a new thing i&#39;m in such a big class we have never done that um so we probably also played by ear a bit and see i mean the first couple of lectures see what feedback we get whether people are struggling with things and then i mean we have i mean i have all the flexibility to to adjust and then explain things again or different things or if people want to see a certain topic we can do that so i mean it&#39;s always good if if i mean it&#39;s good and bad if if you are part of something that has never happened before i mean it&#39;s bad because it&#39;s a bit rough around the edges and but it&#39;s good because you have a lot of influence on on on what shape it takes so i think the the pioneers will be fine and i&#39;m quite excited about it uh spent last night writing example pluto&#39;s contracts that i can show and and i mean for me it&#39;s also a lot of fun of course i mean preparing something like that so i&#39;m really looking forward to it it&#39;s uh the birth of a new programming language of birth of a new ecosystem it&#39;s um it&#39;s exciting as hell yeah it&#39;s always humbling to see it because we spent four years building this and to see that actually wake up and come live is is so incredibly humbling so one last thing one of the things that i&#39;ve always been interested in is computational logic and just this concept of how do we know things are actually correct and true and how do we know proof is right say hey maybe we should express it in the way a computer can understand and if it compiles maybe it&#39;s right uh so that&#39;s become actually pretty vogue in mathematics lately it used to be you were a crazy person in the outside but now thanks to the lean movement and a lot of progress there we&#39;re starting to see modern graduate students wake up to this new reality so another one of our newest collaborations and i just signed the paperwork yesterday for it so uh is with jeremy avagott over at uh over at carnegie mellon university so he&#39;s writing a textbook called lean for mathematicians and we&#39;re subsidizing it so that he can get it done otherwise it&#39;d take five years to get out so we want to get it out as quickly as possible uh and uh then the hope is that eventually we&#39;re going to create a center for formal mathematics at cmu and that center will focus on the intersection of lean and automated theorem proving to uh mathematics and the uh the formalization of mathematics in a machine understandable way now why this is relevant to the blockchain space is that there&#39;s a cool little project called q adidas that you me we&#39;ve been talking about now for i think almost five years we&#39;ve never done anything with it i promised bill white i would do something with it but you want to you want to tell the audience a little bit about q adidas and what what that&#39;s trying to solve what what that&#39;s why that&#39;s interesting right so um i mean the catchphrase would be mathematics on the blockchain or all of mathematics on the blockchain so the idea is that basically i mean there are mathematical theorems on the blockchain and you i mean the transaction that puts a theorem on there must contain a proof and it can maybe reference existing theorems that are already on the blockchain so instead of i mean money that&#39;s transferred you basically the blocks contain theorems and their proofs or the transactions contain theorems their proofs and now if you combine that i mean that is of course already cool because then you have like the universal library of mathematics on the blockchain like with all the usual advantages decentralized and sensors ship resistance and so on but if you combine it with the incentive with an incentive model then it can be really great because then there&#39;s a way to basically earn money by proving stuff which might probably doesn&#39;t sound very exciting to most of people listening to this but for mathematicians it&#39;s actually very exciting that you can actually earn money by proving stuff and it would be a great way to um for inclu occlusion for example for developing countries to um if if somebody from ethiopia for example can can earn some money on income by proving mathematical theorems and it&#39;s also a great way for for nations or corporations to fund research in pure mathematics uh by by setting like bounties uh certain incentives for so it&#39;s a very exciting idea and it was one of those things that we never really knew how to get off the ground and what&#39;s so fascinating is there&#39;s all these trends that are converging like for example the nft market places they&#39;re saying hey let&#39;s create these non-fungible tokens well a proof object is a non-functional token it&#39;s not a functional asset and that you can create all kinds of royalties like if people cite your proof you get part of the reward for that so it creates a a gold rush of people to prove foundational results but actually in general it&#39;s marketplace for deduction and it&#39;s not just mathematical proofs there&#39;s also certification of programs so let&#39;s say that you&#39;re a plutus developer and you write the next unit swap and you want to verify that it&#39;s correct by construction you can actually put up bounties for people to prove that and now you actually have a marketplace to do it so this is a this is a project that we&#39;re we&#39;re super excited to explore and it&#39;s named after the qed manifesto qed&#39;s latin for quote which is that which has been shown usually when you write a math proof you put qed at the bottom of it and the manifesto was about uh a goal of making mathematics machine understandable so that we can involve computers in the proof writing process and then what i&#39;ve noticed when i do these interviews with our our employees is that the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning and that what i mean is that uh you know things you didn&#39;t as a child or as a teenager they tend to come back in a different way in a different form so you were programming as a kid and always doing something with computers as a kid and then you become a mathematician then you become a programmer and now you&#39;re kind of doing math stuff again but also teaching and also programming is coming back but it&#39;s coming back in a way where you can actually holistically utilize all of those skills and that&#39;s uh that&#39;s just so cool that you can see that over a life arc that&#39;s true definitely last question you have this giant bookshelf behind you and anybody who has the giant but the last time i saw that was leslie lamport when he came and spoke he had also a jackpot shelf so which one of your books on that bookshelf is your favorite uh i mean it&#39;s not just math stuff it&#39;s also novels and lots of terry pratchett and uh i actually i i think good luch could be here i mean i really like that although i&#39;m not completely sure hofstetter did you read strange loop yes i did actually but long ago like 20 years ago so uh it is that old right yeah yes well girl asher bach is like 40 years old it&#39;s uh i read that one when i was in my early twenties right oh there&#39;s another one yeah right yes oh um one i i know i wouldn&#39;t say it&#39;s my favorite one but uh actually it has nothing to do with mathematics but i think it&#39;s very cool it&#39;s called almost history i bought it in the u.s in some bookshop it&#39;s about history that could have happened but didn&#39;t like um if something in like the morgan tower plan for after a second world war so where they wanted to turn germany into an agrarian society or things like that um and also from u.s history that&#39;s actually very cool because i mean in my spare time i read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and so on and these altered alternative histories are always interesting but that book i&#39;ve never seen anything like that i mean it&#39;s very cool it&#39;s really written like a history book but it&#39;s about history that didn&#39;t happen but almost could have happened right well thank you so much for spending some time with people of iog it&#39;s a hell of a life story from a child of two countries west and east germany and growing up in a very interesting culture and environment globalizing a bit and having a chance to be a mathematician and a programmer a paper cutter a professional paper guy not a tree cutter didn&#39;t get to the hyper trees uh but we love having you here you&#39;re one of our uh you&#39;re one of our best people and uh it&#39;s so much fun that all the work you&#39;ve done and the diversity of the work you&#39;ve done so for the by heart thank you so much for being part of the iog family and are there any closing thoughts you have for our audience or or for anyone else no just uh thank you very much for having me and it&#39;s really uh i mean i i still can&#39;t believe that uh i mean from my relatively humble beginnings that i&#39;m now like sitting here talking with you and uh traveling through to ethiopia and i mean it&#39;s all these amazing opportunities and i never expected that to happen so that&#39;s actually very cool that but i mean i have always believed and i&#39;ve always told people uh that one should just follow your passion or do what you&#39;re good at so i always somehow was always confident that if i do mathematics and try to do what what uh what i enjoy that at some point um i will find like the perfect job and that luckily turned out to be true so thank you very much well until next time everyone this is charles hoskinson and lars brunius from warm sunny colorado and warm sunny wigginsburg nearby the forest until next time talk to you soon cheers

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People of IOG: Dr. Lars Brunjes

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