Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson

I am a mathematician with far too many hobbies for my own good. I studied for my undergraduate at Stockholm University, my doctorate at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, and did postdoctoral work at Stanford University, University of St Andrews, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. As of August 2016 I join the faculty at CUNY College of Staten Island as Assistant Professor of Data Science.

I have been an active scout, active in the Stockholm region of the Swedish Young Scientists Association. I joined Noisebridge on the inaugural day of the original space at 83c Wiese. I play the piano, B♭ clarinet, alto and tenor saxophone, and have a new-found love for Légère synthetic reeds.

I do a fair amount of art, most of it is on my SmugMug gallery. I am more than happy to sell my art, both originals and giclee prints. Contact me if you are interested.

Here are some of my more random projects.

Tieknots

There are 266 682 tieknots (given some restrictions and definitions). We have built a random tieknot generator.

Mental health

I am Bipolar, Not Otherwise Specified. It shows on the one hand as sporadic bouts of massive creative energy, and as a tendency to be unregulatably silly at times. On the other hand, it shows as a massive emotional vulnerability: there are times when I cry unconsolably, or hide from everyone and everything. I am medicating to stabilize my mood, and my current combination seems to work well.

After discovering a colleague who also struggles with mental health problems, we decided to launch a group blog to build a community and fight the invisibility and alienation of academics with mental health problems.

At the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore, we are organizing a panel discussion on livign with mental health problems in academia and in mathematics.

Stimulated exponential decay

In order to understand my medication and aspects such as burn-in times or the effects of missed doses, I have built a little visualization toy that graphs out a stimulated exponential decay process. This is not in any way to be construed as medical advice of any sort.

XKCD 1688

I got inspired by XKCDs world map identification flowchart, and decided to recreate it as a questionnaire. It includes a DTD for semi-generic flowcharts, and an XML encoding for the XKCD flowchart in that format. I have experimented with building an automatic d3.js tree layout, but it didn't get done yet.