User:Luke Maurits

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[edit] A bit about myself

I am a life-long resident of South Australia and a proud geek. In 2005 I graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor of Mathematical and Computer sciences (B Ma & Comp Sc), majoring in pure and applied mathematics. In 2006 I am working toward getting an Honours degree from Adelaide in (at least) pure maths. My thesis is on the discrete logarithm problem, reflecting the face that abstract algebra and cryptography are among my primary mathematical interests (though analysis is pretty nifty too).

Despite the name of my degree, I've received no formal training in computer sicence (Adelaide doesn't offer a plain Bachelor of Mathematics). I have, however, self-taught myself to a reasonable degree in this area, having been fascinated with everything computer related since an early age, cutting my proverbial teeth (as most geeks my age seem to have) on a Commodore 64. I am a huge fan of UNIX based operating systems, my favourite thus far being NetBSD. I can write code in C and Python. I spend most of my time working with the latter, despite my frequent insistence that Real Men do everything with the former.

In the way of non-technical interests: I am a fan of anime and manga, and to a lesser extent most things to do with Japan. I play Dungeons and Dragons rather less frequently than I'd like to. I read books of the science fiction genre and particularly the cyberpunk subgenre - favourite authors include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson. Practically all the music I listen to could be considered metal, although I'm fairly choosy within that wide genre. I abhor pretty much all metal in which singing is replaced with attempts to immitate the snarling and screeching of the demonically possessed. Bands I particularly approve of include Anathema*, Andromeda, Dragonforce, Hammerfall, Katatonia*, Iced Earth, Lacrimosa, Rammstein, Rhapsody and Sonata Arctica *(in both cases, their present, "clean vocals" work rather than their early stuff).

[edit] A bit about Wiki and I

I've been a regular user of Wikipedia, mainly as a mathematics resource, since shortly after I started university in 2003, but have not made any serious contributions until early 2006.

I suspect most work I may do for Wikipedia will relate to mathematics and/or crypto.

[edit] Wikipedia Activity

• Feb 2006: I am currently taking a relatively intense two week class on computational group theory at RMIT. In looking up related material on Wikipedia I have found that CGT is somewhat underrepresented on Wikipedia and have started some efforts to rectify this. I have created the articles on Schreier vectors and bases and made a few minor edits to related pages. I will continue to add/refine CGT stuff where I can over the duration of this course. At the same time I am beginning preliminary research for my honours thesis on the DLP. A dude named Shoup has written a very relevant paper, and since he has done a lot of other important work and seems to be a fairly well-known name I wrote a brief article on him.