A homeless page is a young courtier who has nowhere to live. I used to be one. Except that I wasn't a courtier...
I was born on another planet. The main country on that planet was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and led the workers of the world - united, no less - to the paradise of communism. My neck of the woods on that planet was called People's Republic of Poland. It was a dreary planet. Look here for a powerful description - by Zbigniew Herbert - of how dreary it was.
But there were universities - not entirely unaffected or immune, but generally retaining the flavour of better times. I went to one of them: the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I graduated from the Jagiellonian, worked at the Department of Logic there (a good part of my heart still is in the seminar room where equivalences were proved "towards the stove" and "towards the window"), got my PhD. Meanwhile, on 4 June 1989 a little miracle happened: semi-free elections were held in Poland. Two things about this day are worth mentioning. One is that it wasn't a miracle, of course, but a cerefully crafted move which left the former communists in possession of most of the country's wealth. But it seemed a miracle then. The other is the date: exactly the day of Tiananmen massacre.
Afterwards, my planet began drifting towards your planet.
In 1998 I moved to Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, where I worked for 5 years. In 2003, I moved to Australia, first to ANU in Canberra, then - after a stint in Italy and Portugal - to Melbourne. I maintain a strong connection with the ALOPHIS group from the University of Cagliari.
Two words that describe what I do: logic and algebra.
Three words that describe what I like: mountains, music and literature. Not necessarily in that order.
Three acronyms that describe what I teach: MAT4MT, MAT3DSA, MAT2ALC. If you do not know what they mean, you are like myself. Acronyms should be banned!
Here is
my Research Gate
page. And here is the page
at Academia.edu.
I am not a statistician, but could not help putting in a a word on statistics by Wislawa Szymborska.
One more Polish connection - the last
one, I promise. Some time ago I came across two books (in Polish), which
seriously made the the following claim it would have been better if
just before the outbreak of World War II Poland took a strategic move
very different from what happened in real history. I was not amused.
What I did not like was the assumption that making a different
strategic move was not only possible, but indeed rational in the
circumstances. Well, let's see... moves in strategic games call for a
game-theoretic analysis, so
here is one
dressed in a sci-fi costume to avoid offending sensibilities.
In case you wondered, the picture on the left (properly interpreted) is of a BCK algebra. It shows that BCK algebras do not have CEP (acronyms should be banned!)