User:Mlliarm

Early years at Crete (approx. 2000-2002)

Who

Michail Liarmakopoulos (Μιχάλης Λιαρμακόπουλος) is a Greek mathematician and (aspiring) computer scientist, born at Marousi, Greece on 1981.

Why

APL is fun and the APL community is very friendly and open-minded.

He firmly believes that APL is a great tool to teach mathematics and in general to reason with.

What

• Software developer in the Big Data realm with a mathematics and physics background.

• Pythonista with an interest in functional (Scheme), declarative (Prolog, SQL), iversonian (APL, J) and rapid numerics (PARI/GP) languages.

• In his free time he enjoys going out with good friends trying out the local cuisine, reading books in English or Greek and Wikipedia lemmas in languages where he's still at a level ∊ ]A0, A1[, such as: Español, Catalá, French, Русский, but which he'd love to learn bit by bit, expanding thus the interval to the semi-closed interval ]A0, A1].

• Finally, he loves diving every day deeper and deeper in APL, as well as creating small programming projects that combine not so widely used languages (Scheme, Prolog, APL, J, PARI/GP) that solve some weird problem in mathematics or physics.

Where

• His hometown is Patras, a nice city in south-west Greece on the Peloponnese.

• Spent the most important years of his life at the island of Crete where he studied Physics at a bachelors' level and graduated at 2010.

• After a short trip in Europe during the period 2011-2013 he returned to Patras. There he studied Mathematics at a masters' level and after that he got a job at InSyBio, a bioinformatics startup as a scientific python developer.

• On late December of 2019 he got a job offer from Webhelp Spain, and moved to Barcelona, Catalonia along with his partner and their cat.

• The pandemic hit the city on late March 2021, three months after starting working at Webhelp. Along with other Webhelp employees he was sent home and continued working from there. During the many quarantines, he enjoyed passing his time reading mathematics, listening to Greek music and chilling at the terraza of his flat along with his cat.

Studies

Patras

• He went to a relatively good high school and focused on hard sciences (Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry), which made sense to him more than the classical studies (Ancient Greek, History, Greek language).

• In the last year's exams, he sat at the pretty infamous, for the stress imposed to the students, Panhellenic exams on Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Greek composition.

• He sat this exam twice. His goal had been from an early age (~16 or so) to get in a Physics department because he enjoyed creating small electrical circuits that would solve a very specific problem. At the first time he wrote 08/20 in Physics, 14.5/20 in Mathematics, 16/20 in Chemistry and 08/20 in Greek composition. The second time he wrote 18/20 in Physics, 14.5/20 (grade reserved from 1st time), 16/20 (grade reserved from 1st time) and 10/20 in Greek composition. He entered the Physics school but from the beginning we was drawn towards mathematics, consequently abandoning electronics and circuits.

• People from that period of his life that played major role in his future development were: his father Logothetis (from Naxos), his mother Chrysa (from Palaia Epidavros), his physics teacher Vaso Xouria and his uncle and mathematics teacher Elias Tourloukis.

• Logothetis had been the theoretical mind, the academic scientist of the family and made sure both he and his brother Panagiotis would learn how to take decisions based on reason and not emotions. Logothetis studied economics and management at the prestigious ASOEE, and afterwards he furthered his studies in the '70s at the UK, at the university of Southampton and that of Lancaster, from where he got a MSc in Management sciences. After returning from the UK back to Greece with Chrysa, he was appointed as a professor of Management at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens and later at the '90s at TEI of Patras where from he retired sometime at the '00s. During all his years he's written several books related to management, a partial list of which can be found here, at the library of the University of Piraeus.

• Chrysa had always been the practical mind of the family that brought the stability and harmony needed. A cook extraordinaire. Having finished a technical school in Athens of the 50s that specialized on cosmetics, at an era when women rarely would go off for studies as such behavior was against the social norms and expectations. She worked as a successful professional in the cosmetics industry till she got pregnant to Michail and Panagiotis, when she decided to devote herself to the careful upbringing of her children, quitting her full time job.

• Both of his parents during their lives chased their dreams even if those dreams went against the social norms and dogmas.

• Logothetis and Chrysa now live a quiet life together outside Patras, at a remote village of mountain Panachaiko along with their numerous cats.

Crete

• He was very fortunate to have excellent professors that shaped the way he thought and did research.

• A few names: the professor of General Physics (Φ1, Φ2) and Newtonian Mechanics (ΚΜ1), Nikolaos Kylafis had a great impact on him, and introduced him in the axiomatic way of thinking. Was tought Calculus (M1, M2) by the very stimulating Taxiarchis Papakostas. Was introduced to the lovely field of Linear Algebra and to Probability theory (ΜΦ1) by Iossif Papadakis.

• He had been taught dimensional analysis by the legendary Eleftherios Economou. Ordinary Differential Equations (ΣΔΕ) by Elias Kiritsis. Self-studied Partial Differential Equations (ΜΔΕ) and Complex Analysis (ΜΦ2). Sat on two graduate Physics classes during his last year of studies (Quantum Many Body Theory and Analytic Mechanics) that were given by Gregory Psaltakis. Psaltakis had shown him the beauty and unity of mathematical physics, something that left him an everlasting impression.

• Was taught Experimental Physics with Christos Chaldoupis and Dimitris Charalambidis. Was introduced to computational physics (using Fortran 77) firstly by Christos Chaldoupis mentioned earlier and then by Xenophon Zotos. The second one made his experiences with Fortran77 pleasant. The first one showed him that he was surely not fond of experimental physics, but that he enjoyed writing reports on the results of the experiments and doing the analysis, and lastly also introduced him (unsuccessfully) to the DISLIN Fortran graph library. It was something like matplotlib, but for Fortran.

• Around 2004 he'd discovered at the Mathematics' department library the book "Foundations of Analysis" by Edmund Landau. This book changed his focus from Physics to Mathematics permanently.

Edinburgh

• On Sept. of 2011 he got accepted at the University of Edinburgh in the school of Mathematics to read Operations Research at a graduate level. Finished with a PgCert on 2012. Julian Hall had been of much help and inspiration, then and later.

Patras

• In his graduate studies at the Mathematics department pretty much was the place where he became the closest he could become to a mathematician. Kosmas Iordanidis introduced him to a facet of Numerics that he'd never seen before, from the book of Demidovich. Panagiotis Alevizos introduced him to Computational Geometry from Preparatas' and Shamos' pretty difficult to digest book. Thankfully Shamos' PhD thesis was an excellent read, and after creating a group study to pass this class and with the help of his good friend and pretty bright young mathematician, TaiPanagiotis G., he managed to pass the class the 3rd and last time just before he got removed from the program.Theodoula Grapsa introduced him to Interval Analysis and Numerical Optimization. Omiros Raggos introduced him to Mathematical Logic and Prolog, and also gave him the opportunity to learn C++ by teaching during the computer labs sessions the undergraduate students of the department to the practical aspects of the language, the GNU/Linux console, the g++ compiler etc. To keep track of the labs and to share useful material with the students, he'd created a website.

• His final project was on Active Machine learning with Sotos Kotsiantis as a supervisor. If interested, see here the MSc thesis (Greek).

Books

• You can see his Goodreads profile here.

Name

• Most Greek friends call him Μιχάλη and most non Greek friends call him Mike.
• In Spanish "Michail" is pronounced "Mitsael", which he finds pretty funny and uses it when he has to introduce himself to a local.

Contact

• Github: mlliarm
• Discord: milia#0919
• Twitter: @mlliarm