My name is Tristan Larkin. Most of the time I am an over-caffeinated graduate student.
Otherwise, I am hiking, camping, rock climbing, and ping ponging. The
T lambda that
appears around my site is a play on my initials TL, replacing the L with my favorite greek letter lambda
(yeah I have a favorite greek letter).
I am a computer science and physics graduate, and am
continuing my education in physics at the University of New Mexico. I love learning about
the clever ways clever people have discovered to understand our crazy universe. I get particular satisfaction from
quantum mechanics and using symmetries to reorient a difficult problem into something easy. Given by background
it was inevitable for me to develop an interest in quantum computing, which has recently become my main focus. I
want to study the way quantum information acts and make strong analogies to category theory and type theory. I have a
hunch that there are valuable insights to be found in these fields and there are swaths of research already done that
might be able to be recycled into quantum information!
I believe that programming a beautiful method we have to express our ideas, which happens to
be how we communicate with computers. In the same way that learning other
human languages
can extend your understanding of people, I am a proponent of learning many
programming languages, techniques, and paradigms to expand the breath of ways to think about a problem.
I had the opportunity to get into the weeds of Python while working on the
OpenCSP
project at Sandia National Laboratories, but my favorite take on programming is displayed by
Haskell,
which is a functional programming language that is "non-standard" in such a beautiful way.
I also have dabbled with Julia, Pie, Scheme, C, Java, JS, and Go to varying degrees, and each of them
provides a lens in which to view the problems you want to solve.
