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.