Melusina

Michaël Le Barbier

ThoughtWorks Alumni, Max Plank Alumni, PhD Mathematics, Agrégé de Mathématiques

I am Michaël Le Barbier, the author of the texts on this site. I am also Infrastructure Consultant at ThoughtWorks.

I previously worked as a math researcher in the field of algebraic geometry and representation theory of reductive groups, as a financial mathematician, and as software developer.

Development and Operations

Cloud technologies shifted the frontier between hardware and software, allowing us to program tasks like “setup a computer in this computer center” or “change disks of that computer” instead of performing them physically. Together with the ongoing research in software development methodologies, which evolved to replace pharaonic projects carried out by a state by iterative developments attainable by an enthusiastic programmer, these two changes opened a world of opportunities to be taken.

Financial mathematician

As a financial mathematician at much-net AG I worked as a quantitative analyst, supervising the pricing (including VaR, sensitivies and other more advanced metrics) of a large (more than 150) exotic derivatives, and of a programmer, optimizing PMS internal models for time and speed (LMM) and implementing new ones (quantum LMM).

Mathematical research

I wrote my PhD thesis “Varieties of reductions for reductive algebraic groups” under the co-direction of Laurent Manivel and Nicolas Ressayre. This work contributes to the classification of Fano varieties, a crucial problem in birational geometry and contemporary physics, by investigating the varieties of reductions for a reductive algebraic group first defines by Atanas Iliev and Laurent Manivel.

After defending my PhD, I spent one year as a guest scientist at the MPIM and one subsequent year at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics, where I constructed a universal family for the subgroups of an algebraic group (as an ind-variety).

Publications and pre-publications

Technical bits about this site’s backend

This site uses the base Jekyll theme and is hosted on GitHub. Articles are written using the kramdown variant of markdown. It uses synthax highlighting from rouge.