About

My journey began at 14, when I taught myself to code. At 18, frustrated by the German education system, I dropped out of school just six months before my Abitur. I chose a self-directed learning path instead, inspired by humanistic ideals. I spent hours in libraries studying different disciplines like literature, biology, physics, and drawing. I went out to identify plants and worked on multiple personal software projects.

That frustration turned out to be productive. Stepping out of school gave me new ideas and, more than that, new people and connections I would never have found in a classroom. I think education systems are broken almost everywhere, not only in Germany. Alternatives exist, though, and they are not exotic; they line up with what pedagogical research has argued for decades, and they leave curiosity and the urge to explore intact instead of wearing them down.

Eventually, I discovered that mathematics was what intrigued me most; especially its complexity and the unique way of thinking it teaches. It allows us to navigate this world from a different perspective.

It was networking that ultimately accelerated my career, landing me a software engineering job at a startup in New York and Los Angeles. We built a video platform for artists, and much of the work went into how they could earn more from what they made; we tried monetization models that did not exist yet and experimented heavily with cryptocurrencies and how to integrate them. In this environment, I learned a lot about startups and the business side of things.

In 2023, I returned to academia to pursue mathematics and computer science professionally at Heidelberg University, backed by a scholarship from the Foundation of German Business (sdw).

My current interest lies at the intersection of mathematics and computer science, specifically systems theory and high-performance computing. Ultimately, I want to apply these tools to solve biological and ecological challenges.

I have been writing since I was a little child, and I still do. Essays and stories go out on my Substack, in German; the novel I am working on, also in German, moves more slowly. Telling tales is one of the elemental pillars of being human, as games are, though nowadays we call both entertainment.

Those years of self-study were formative, and I still strive for that ideal: to accept being human and what comes with it, and to keep body and mind in balance. That means a balance of art, craft, logic and science, movement, and social life.