Matthias Valvekens

Current status

I'm currently employed as a Research Engineer at iText in Ghent. I was a researcher at KU Leuven from 2016 to 2020, where I completed my PhD in mathematics under the supervision of prof. Stefaan Vaes. My research centred around the representation theory of rigid C^*-tensor categories, subfactor theory and quantum groups.

Technical skillset

My side projects over the past few years have mostly involved Python and Django. I'm pretty confident that I can handle whatever Django problem you throw at me, from architectural design through coding all the way to deployment and administration.

I also have extensive experience with the Java ecosystem (including a couple of internships), and I've dabbled in Haskell for a while to run combinatorial experiments for my mathematical research.

Miscellanea

I speak Dutch, English, Japanese and French, and I'm involved with several choirs in and around Leuven.

Research articles

1. D. Kyed, S. Raum, S. Vaes, and M. Valvekens, L²-Betti numbers of rigid C^*-tensor categories and discrete quantum groups, Analysis & PDE 10 (2017), no. 7, 1757–1791. arXiv:1701.06447
2. S. Vaes and M. Valvekens, Property (T) discrete quantum groups and subfactors with triangle presentations, Advances in Mathematics 345 (2019), 382–428. arXiv:1804.04006
3. M. Valvekens, L²-Betti numbers of rigid C^*-tensor categories associated with totally disconnected groups, International Mathematics Research Notices (to appear). arXiv:2001.10757

See here for a more complete list.