So I’ve been thinking a bit, I’m not completely sure what I’m going to be doing in the next few years (or more to the point where), but the plan is to go on to a PhD, hopefully starting next year in either April/May or September, after I’ve finished my masters here in Barcelona.
As I said, I’m not quite sure what I’d like to study, so I’ve been going over my options and trying to work out which area I’d like to work in (that’s right kids, after year 12 it doesn’t necessarily get any easier to answer that question). I started looking at the people I really admire in my field, people like Edsger Dijkstra, Chris Wallace, and Leslie Lamport. They all have one thing in common, they were all mathematicians before they became computer scientists (well, Wallace studied physics, but in Australia that’s probably admirable). Now, in their cases they didn’t exactly have the option of starting in computer science, but the point still stands that all the genius they provided the world with probably wouldn’t have come about if they’d spent their time learning assembly language rather than special relativity.
So perhaps, if I’m going to be the sort of computer scientist (or robotocist or cryptographer) that I want to be I need this sort of grounding in serious mathematics. In short, I think I’m going to see about doing a doctorate in mathematics. Of course, maybe you should ask me next week.