Carsen Berger

About

• Home
• Research & Publications
• Résumé
• Code Samples
• Contact Me

• Professional

  I am a fourth-year undergraduate student in mathematics and computer science at the University of Chicago. Currently I am looking for job opportunities in software engineering after I graduate this June; for more information or to request an interview, please see my résumé or send me an email. I am particularly interested in working on high-performance compilers or related developer tools and programming language technologies. My focus within computer science has been on the theory and implementation of functional languages, with a recent emphasis on low-level performance tuning and compiler internals. My main mathematical interest, broadly, is the application of algebraic techniques and structures to the studies of logic and computation (and vice versa). In particular, I have become somewhat of a disciple of category theory.

  I work on optimizations in a parallel compiler, Manticore, under the supervision of Lars Bergstrom. The project is lead by Dr. John Reppy. I came up with a strategy for performing common subexpression elimination that produces a 3% speedup in our programs, and I'm now working on implementing an efficient and safe-for-space closure coversion algorithm in our compiler, following the work of Shao and Appel.

  I spent the past two summers in Dr. J. Peter May's wonderful REU program in theoretical mathematics, investigating the interplay between category theory, mathematical logic, and programming language theory. See my Research & Publications page for more information on this.

  In the distant past I spent three summers working at the Desert Research Institute in Dr. Daniel Obrist's atmospheric chemistry lab. In addition to doing field and lab work, I designed and built the lab's data processing framework using a mix of Stata and Excel, and crunched all the numbers for our paper on gaseous elemental mercury emissions.

  Personal

  In my free time I enjoy cooking, homebrewing, weight training, and snowboarding (whenever I get a chance to leave the mountain-free Midwest, that is). I also occasionally enjoy armchair musings on foundational issues in mathematics and the philosophy thereof. Occasionally. :-)

  Photo

  
• I can be reached by email at clberger@uchicago.edu

---