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

I have a strong interest in digital signing, especially as applied to PDF files. In my personal projects, this mostly manifests in my work on pyHanko (a PDF signing toolkit). Together with some of my iText colleagues, I'm part of the Belgian delegation to ISO/TC 171/SC 2. Besides contributing to the "core" PDF standard (ISO 32000), I'm also personally involved with the development of several extension standards under SC 2.

I've done quite a bit of work on Python web applications for various side projects over the past few years. In particular, 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.