Philipp Birklbauer came to work with me from Austria where he was
one of the best young computer programmers and mathematics students.
Philipp's computer background came in very handy during the first
part of his thesis when Philipp wrote a very efficient computer
program to check the cases required to prove that the Fuglede
Conjecture holds in three dimensional vector spaces over integers
modulo seven. In the second half of his thesis, Philipp did some
very nice work on the two-parameter variant of the Erdos distance
problem in vector spaces over finite fields, and on the problem of
distances from points to hyperplanes.
Philipp was always interested in returning to computer programming
and he is now working for Google where his combination of
mathematical and programming skills work together very nicely. In
addition to his mathematical and computer science prowess, Philipp
is a very sensitive human being who cares deeply about many
important social causes.