When not climbing in the Alps or racing a carbon fiber Pinarello, I am an applied mathematician, geographic information systems scientist and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. I also teach courses in the history computation and the foundations of GIS at University College London and at Sorbonne Université - Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris.

I am the founder of the Relic-Code Lab, where our research is dedicated to the reconstruction and conservation of historic software—programs, algorithms, and computational systems that have historically shaped our digital world, but which are now technologically inaccessible or materially endangered.

Our work combines digital forensics, archival research, programming language history, and emulation to bring vanished computational objects back into view. We collaborate with libraries, museums, and archives to preserve fragile code and to document the intellectual, political, and social contexts that gave rise to these artifacts.

Our current conservation projects center on reconstructing the code of the Simulmatics Corporation, who revolutionised computational election and voting trend analysis in the 1960s; on preserving materials from the early use of computers in US congressional redistricting; conserving the early mathematical proof assistant, the Logic Theorist; and working on emulating the code found in the seminal Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography.

The Lab‘s theoretical work is focused on trying to apply renormalisation group and wavelet methods, to study the underlying foundations and mathematics of deep and machine learning.

The author or editor of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times and NPR selection, MAP: Exploring the World , I am now trying to turn a mess of mathematical course notes into the forthcoming book, The Algebra of Space: Lectures on Mereotopology, Category Theory and the Ontological Foundations of Geographic Information Science.

With an interest in the origins and metaphysical foundations of point-free geometries, and the use of region based topologies in the history of GIS, I am also working on a mathematical commentary on Alfred North Whitehead’s 1916, La Theorie Relationniste de L’Espace and William Lawvere's 1992, Categories of Space and Quantity.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS), I find being close to the gentle hum of supercomputers, pondering Wittgenstein’s Notes on Logic, and exploring the deep labyrinths of the renormalization group, strangely comforting.

I currently live in Nice, France.