Biography

Kai Kaminski is a student of mathematics and computer science with a strong background in programming. While in high-school he was mostly interested in computer graphics and low-level programming. Later his focus shifted to high-level languages and algorithmic problems. His interests cover pure as well as applied mathematics, software development and theoretical computer science. Before discovering his affinity towards Lisp in general and Common Lisp in particular he used Python, C and, to a lesser extent, C++. He also seems to fondly remember bits and pieces of Pascal, x86 Assembler and several Basic dialects. University-related and commercial projects allowed him to gain valuable experience in software development. Among those projects were the design and implementation of large parts of a vector drawing application and a module to control a soccer team of Lego Mindstorm robots. Last year he was member of a small team taking part in the ICFP contest placing 44th and 63rd out of 361 participants (Team Pants, http://www.cis.upenn.edu/proj/plclub/contest/results.php). His mathematical interests cover data mining and wavelet-based compression as well as several pure fields in analysis.