New PhD student at ILLC: Troy Lee

Troy Lee (USA) is PhD student at the ILLC, starting February 1, 2002 Below you can find a small text he has written to introduce himself.

The path I took to the ILLC began a long way away, physically and academically. Growing up in Hawaii (11 hours time difference!) I was in love with physics and sure that was what I would study in the future. For university I moved closer to the ILLC, to California (9 hours time difference), and there my interests moved towards the foundations and language of physics, to mathematics. Studying mathematics I felt the same relentless counter clockwise pull, and quickly became interested in the foundations and language of mathematics, that is in logic. Even from this distance it is still quite far to the ILLC, so the summer before I came here to do my Master's I made a rest stop on the east coast of the US (6 hours time difference) to attend a summer school in computational complexity. In computational complexity I found an area full of the ILLC's namesakes - evaluating the computational complexity of languages through logical means - and it was in this area I did my master's thesis. Now physically and academically I have arrived at a place I would like to stay a while.