teichmanphilosophy

Hello. My name is Matt. I write software, teach computer science, host a podcast, write philosophy, sing, skate, and make 16mm films.

contact

    @ElucidationsPod 

    https://elucidations.vercel.app 

    sprintf "%s@%s.edu" "teichman" "uchicago"

employment

education

bio

I have been Programming Specialist at the Unviersity of Chicago Digital Library Development Center since 2019, where I write custom software for librarians. My work there is pretty diverse, but recently my group has been building a unified framework for presenting the library's digital collections to the public. Another exciting project has been to work with Special Collections on software for converting the university's email collections into an archivally stable format.

I teach functional programming in the Masters Program in Computer Science at the university, which has been my main research interest since completing my PhD. My doctoral research was in natural language semantics, which you can think of as the formal study of how to build sentence meanings out of word meanings. A bit like what a programming language compiler does when it translates human-readable high-level code into machine instructions, except that here, we do it for human languages like English or Hungarian. Currently, I am excited about the prospects for functional programming and type theory, which have the potential to revolutionize both software development and philosophical logic.

In addition to all that, I host the Elucidations podcast, a philosophy podcast that has been running monthly since 2009, and which was awarded an Emergent Ventures fellowship from the Mercatus Center in 2019 and 2020. The program aims to cover every philosophical topic under the sun. I run an internship program on campus that allows undergraduates to collaborate with me on the production of the show.