About me

My name is Josh Holland, and I’m currently a PhD student at the University of Southampton. I am investigating ways to use the string diagrams of symmetric monoidal category theory to model systems of computation such as signal flow graphs and Petri nets. For a friendly introduction, see Graphical Linear Algebra, the blog run by my supervisor, Paweł Sobociński.

Before I started my PhD, I worked for Sirius, an independent IT contractor based in the South of England specialising in open source solutions, and prior to that I studied Mathematics at Keble College, Oxford for my undergraduate degree, culminating in an MMath. I grew up in Worcester, in the West Midlands of the UK.

My extra-curricular interests include music, tabletop games, and languages. I sing with the Southampton Philharmonic Choir, and previously in the Keble College Chapel Choir and Worcester Cathedral Choir. As well as my personal collection of board games, I play Go and Yomi online, uploading tournament games of the latter to my YouTube channel. Beyond using languages to connect with people, I am interested in languages which exemplify radically different foundations to my native English, particularly conlangs. To that end, I have spent some time learning Lojban, Toki Pona and Esperanto; I regularly attend the meetings of the Southampton Esperanto Group, whose website I maintain and host.

I also enjoy playing with yoyos. I post videos of tricks to my Instagram, as well as documenting my culinary exploits, family pets and other things I see around my life that catch my eye.

You can get in touch with me via the social media links in the navigation bar, or by email to josh@inv.alid.pw.

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