Kurt Luoto’s Homepage
I am a new postdoc here at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, aka UBC, as of autumn 2009. My sponsoring faculty members are Steph van Willigenburg and Andrew Rechnitzer. I finished my PhD in June 2009 at the University of Washington, Seattle under co-advisors Isabella Novik and Sara Billey. I have one paper published, and I have been privileged to share the material by giving a number of talks (see my CV page). Since then I have collaborated with Jim Haglund, Steph van Willigenburg, and Sarah Mason on the topic of quasisymmetric Schur functions and related polynomials. We have two papers now on arXiv which have been submitted to a journals. More recently I have been collaborating with Steph and with Christine Bessenrodt on some follow-on material, with a paper now in preparation.
I am probably the eldest graduate of the PhD program at UW in recent years. But mathematically, I am still very much a youngster, and I like to think that I have the same youthful enthusiasm for the subject that my younger peers enjoy. I have not been in “the math racket” long enough to be jaded or tired. I am enjoying myself immensely.
In my previous life, I worked in the software industry for over 20 years, mostly making embedded software for telecom and datacom gear. Then after having overstayed my welcome in the industry, I was laid off from my last company, a Silicon Valley startup, in 2002 when the entire industry was in the throes of depression. I viewed this as divine permission to leave that industry and get back to studying my favorite topic: mathematics. This was my long detour on the way to academia.
This is my “personal” web page, where I provide personal and professional information about myself. If you are looking for the class web page of any class that I am currently teaching, then you need to visit my “teaching” web page, which you can get to by clicking here.
A long detour
Office: Math Annex Room 1215
Phone: 604-822-3783
Email: kwluoto (at) math.ubc.ca
