Hello friend! I am just wrapping up my maths PhD at the Utrecht Geometry Centre, supervised by Álvaro del Pino Gómez. My research concerns differential topology, and in particular homotopy principle approaches to non-local differential relations.

I'm now trying to figure out what to do next in life. I love the research and teaching in academia, but not necessarily the boundary conditions around that. In the end, my main concern is to figure out some way to contribute to a better world in a team with others. If you have ideas, let me know! I even went so far to keep a LinkedIn profile.

Before coming to Utrecht for my maths master in 2018, I completed an MSc Physics at TU Dortmund with a focus on particle theory. I have an amateur radio license, callsign DO1AGD. I also try to go bouldering and swimming at least weekly.

Projects

  • fakenet [git]: To learn more about networking, I set up a little fake internet! Concretely, I use containerlab to deploy a fleet of Docker containers: Four autonomous systems in a ring topology connected by BGP routers (FRR, Arista cEOS) and some DNS servers (BIND9, both primary and secondary) reachable by anycast IP. Next, I want to run an IGP (probably OSPF) in a larger AS.
  • keyboards [git]: Using KiCad, I designed and built a split bluetooth keyboard with custom ZMK firmware. I'm planning a next version where the MCU is mounted directly on my custom PCB and runs my own firmware :D
  • RGB LEDs (git repo coming once I find the time to clean up the code a bit): I built a matrix of 1050 individually adressable RGB LEDs controlled by a custom UDP protocol on an ESP32 microcontroller via WiFi. I wrote a C program with a Nuklear GUI that determines colors by cross-compiling a custom scripting language into GLSL shaders, allowing e.g. animations that react to currently playing music by a live Fourier transform :)
  • beeperino [git] is is a little command line tool to help me learn Morse code (at face value) and Rust (actually). It can encode and decode ASCII, play Morse code as audio and train you by the Koch method.
  • A little generative art experiment [run] drawing flows along vector fields in a vanilla JS canvas. Play around with the presets! Source code entirely contained in the page except Stefan Gustavson's perlin.js.

Theses

Some Talks

Here are some of my talk notes and slides. The latter were built using reveal.js, you can navigate through them in the browser using arrow keys.
  • Jet configuration spaces and weightings. Higher geometric structures along the lower Rhine XVIII in Nijmegen, January 2025 [slides]
  • Weighted blow-ups. Workshop Geometry in Timișoara, March 2024 [slides]
  • Translated points of contactomorphisms. Master's thesis presentation at Utrecht, September 2020 [slides] [thesis]
  • Gluing manifolds along boundaries. Morse theory student seminar at Utrecht, March 2020 [slides] [notes]
  • Homotopy type of manifolds. Morse theory student seminar at Utrecht, March 2020 [notes]

Supervision

I'm proud to have cosupervised the following student's theses at Utrecht together with Álvaro:
  • Esther Steenkamer: Removal of singularities through hierarchies of singularities, Master's thesis. September 2023 to June 2024.
  • Sam Lindauer: Horizontal knots in Martinet distributions, Bachelor's thesis. November 2021 to June 2022.
  • Mick Schilder: Regular Homotopies and the Sphere Eversion, Bachelor's thesis. February to July 2021.
  • Bas de Pooter: Differential relations with delay, Master's thesis. October 2020 to July 2021.

Teaching

I was a teaching assistant for a bunch of maths courses at Utrecht University, including:
  • Intro to Group and Rings (Summer 2024)
  • Differential Equations (Spring 2024)
  • Differential Geometry (Winter 2023)
  • Intro to Topology (Fall 2022)
  • Smooth Manifolds (Summer 2022)
  • Intro to Topology (Fall 2021)
  • Intro to Multivariate Analysis (Fall 2021)
  • Multivariate Analysis (Summer 2021)
  • Introduction to Geometry (Spring 2021)
I was also a TA for physics courses at TU Dortmund:
  • Quantum Field Theory (Summer 2016)
  • Physics III and Physics IV, covering analytical mechanics, optics and quantum physics (2014/15)

Finally, I was a Tutor for an exchange student on behalf of the German Academic Exchange Service (Summer 2012 at TU Dortmund).

Publications

  • J. Brod, A. G.-D., M. Tammaro and J. Zupan: "Effective Field Theory for Dark Matter Direct Detection up to Dimension Seven". Published in J. High Energ. Phys. (2018), arXiv:1710.10218 [hep-ph]