Priyaa Varshinee Srinivasan


I am a compassionate mathematician working as a post-doctoral researcher at  the Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. Along with research in category theory, I am  interested in creating pathways to make math communication user-friendly and approachable – from math in school to mathematical research.  I derive inspiration from the works of Tai Danae Bradley, Eugenia Cheng, John Baez, Pawel Sobocinski, Bob Coecke, David Spivak and many others in this area. My research experience includes categorical quantum mechanics, linearly distributive categories and currently polynomial functors. 

I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Robin Cockett at University of Calgary. My PhD thesis was at the crossroads of computer science, mathematics and quantum theory and in an inter-disciplinary field called  categorical quantum mechanics. Details on my thesis projects can be found in this page.

I am broadly interested in the interaction of concurrency and quantum computing. Details on a few of my projects are availabe in this page.

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Career Timeline

2023 - Present Postdoctoral Fellow Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia (Sep '24 -  Present)

2023 - 2024 Postdoctoral Fellow Topos Institute, Berkeley, USA (Aug '23 - Jul '24)

2022 - 2023 International Research Associate National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA (Jan '22 - Jul '23)

2021  Sessional Lecturer  University of British Columbia, Canada (Sep - Dec)

2015 - 2021  Ph.D. in Computer Science University of Calgary, Canada (supervised by Prof. Robin Cockett)

2012 - 2014 Masters of Mathematics in Computer Science University of Waterloo, Canada (supervised by Prof. Martin Karsten)

2009 - 2012  Software Engineer II Hewlett Packard India Software Operations, India

2005 - 2009 Bachelors in Computer Science Engineering Madras Institute of Technology, India

I am interested in communicating mathematics inclusively & accessibly. Below are a few materials based on my talks.  

Message passing logic

Linear actegories are a formal diagrammatic framework for reasoning about concurrent message passing systems. They are developed by Cockett and Pastro in 2009 in their paper Message passing logic. This talk explains the motivation and structure of the logic, linear actegories and a toy model.

Dagger linear logic

Categorical quantum mechanics applies methods for category theory to develop a diagrammatic reasoning formalism for quantum processes. In my thesis, we extended the exisiting formalism from monoidal to linearly distributive categories (LDCs). These talks introduces LDCs and my thesis work.

Blog series

The aim of this blog series is to provide an accessible, intuitive introduction to linearly distributive categories, functors, transformations, other associated structures and applications by assimilating information  spread across multiple highly technical articles, and to encourage discussion.

Publications

Author names are arranged alphabetically by their last name which is a standard practice in mathematics literature.

Book

Refereed Journal publications

Peer-reviewed conference Proceedings

Pre-prints

Thesis

Research visits

Invited talks

Conference talks

Teaching and Mentorship

 Lead a pilot project to develop online content on relational thinking (category theory) based on the Algebraic Julia library for STEM-oriented audience interested in applied category theory. The book leverages on illustrations, and live coding to communicate formal concepts intutitively. The goal of the book is not just to teach mathematical  but also to explore the hows and whys of mathematical thinking, more specifically, category theory. 

Blog posts on the technology and the story-telling style of this book - https://topos.site/blog/2024-06-28-fantastic-book-four-months-i/

 As a team project at our research group on compassionate mathematics, launched the Relatorium series with the support of the Topos Insititute. The aim of the monthly seminar series is to discuss math and math-related topics that we do not get to hear in traditional math talks. The seminars are designed to be somewhere in between a technical talk and a podcast. The aim is to create a safe space for the speaker to explore new ideas as well as the audience to engage with the speaker, and with one another. 

The talks are live-casted YouTube at the Relatorium channel. The talks are also announced at the researchseminars.org. 

Project: Message passing logic for categorical quantum mechanics

Teaching Assistants: Rose Kudzman-Blais (University of Ottowa), Amolak Ratan Kalra (University of Waterloo)

Mentees: Brandon Baylor (Systems Engineer, Chevron Corporation), Durgesh Kumar (Senior undergraduate, Asoka University, India), Fabian Wiesner (Ph.D. student, Technische Universität Berlin), Isaiah Hilsenrath (Senior undergraduate, University of Maryland USA), Paige Frederick (Software Engineer,  Super.tech)

Committees