I’m a Canadian, born in Ontario. I studied mathematics in school, starting with my bachelors degree at the University of Ottawa. For one year after, I tried applying mathematics to psychology, but went back to pure mathematics to get my masters and PhD at McGill University, finishing that in 2016.
After getting my PhD, I studied for two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Although I loved Australia, to be honest, I didn’t really enjoy studying mathematics at a postdoctoral level because it required conforming with some existing research field and producing results that in my opinion were just too arcane to be interest any more. If you’re interested, you can read an article I wrote about that.
Luckily, at that point I discovered birds and bird photography and I found I enjoyed photography much more than academia. Still, after my postdoctoral fellowship, I got a job in research mathematics outside of academia. Although it was a nice place to work with nice people, it wasn’t my style. I don’t really like work when there’s a lot of routine or frequent interaction with people. Moreover, the sort of work I was doing was about supporting global capitalism and the system, which I didn’t much like either.
Eventually, I managed to get a cool job writing at Photography Life, and I finally managed to quit my math job in 2023. I was a lot happier and since then I much prefer talking about birds and bird photography instead of doing technical work that I found very meaningless. Now I write articles about photography and create videos on my YouTube channel. And one of my main goals is to get as far away from civilization as possible.