Hi there!

The name is Pawel; I’m just a guy with a math PhD (who also loves semicolons and parentheses). I received a couple degrees from the University of Waterloo and then completed my PhD at the University of Ottawa in 2023. I then returned to Waterloo for two years to bang out some more research. I’m also man of various unique interests.

Research

I did research in the field of operator algebras and functional analysis. I pretty much studied really big matrices (even infinite!), and how they interact with eachother. OA has applications all over the place, including quantum mechanics & quantum information, quantum field theory, noncommutative geometry, dynamical systems & ergodic theory, random matrices & free probability, index theory, and data science & machine learning, to name a few. I’ve written several papers in the field, which you can see here.

Hobbies

Privacy nuttage

I’m, simply put, a privacy nut.

You: how can you be a privacy nut when you have a website telling us all about yourself? You also have all these socials. Also, being a privacy nut isn’t even a hobby…

Well, good question, and good points. I’ll get to that.

Language learning

I like learning languages.

I was raised bilingual, with my second language being Polish. I was actually surprised to find out some time in highschool that I was officially “ESL” (English Second Language) – nobody had told me, and I just saw it on the report card one day. I think, for my whole life, I would consider myself an English speaker first and a Polish speaker second.

French is Canada’s official second language. I never learned it. One day I’d like to.

I got really bored (and sufficated, and sad, like everyone else) during covid, and learned how to read Japanese. I’ve since realized that reading doesn’t help too much with listening or speaking. It also turns out that you get bad at things you neglect. So, I’ve been trying to improve there.

I’m also trying to pick up Spanish. I think it’s a cool language, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Spain, and I’ve had spanish-speaking friends my whole life.

I learn languages traditionally (I actually enjoying going through grammar books), but also immerse and use Anki. I wrote some scripts to help me not spend all my time creating anki cards.

Rock climbing

I’m an avid climber, and have been for a while now. I never realized I was scared of heights until I started climbing, but that’s how she goes sometimes. I still do it.

I’ve shakily followed some friends up a small mountain or two, successfully climbed some others, have wrapped a pineapple tanktop around a friend’s bloody head, and have hit the ground because, as it turns out, rocks break sometimes… It’s always a good time.

My recent rock climbing interest has been board climbing (Tension Board 2 and Kilter). I enjoy it so much did an analysis of some data and built ML models to predict grades off of route geometry alone (no hold info!), see Tension-Board-2-Analysis & Kilter-Board-Analysis.