People / Kevin Carlson

Senior Research Associate

About

Kevin is a mathematician, software engineer and math educator. He comes to Topos from a category theory Ph.D. at UCLA and master’s at Cambridge via a period in ed tech. His key intellectual interest is in finding effective angles for non-experts to use and understand mathematical structures that have traditionally been reserved for a narrow group of initiates focused on problems far from everyday life. This applies to everything from helping ordinary category theorists use infinity-categories to helping high schoolers use group theory to, primarily now, helping scientists use categorical structures in their applied work. He was known as Kevin Arlin between 2019 and 2024.

Personal website

https://github.com/KevinDCarlson

Blog posts

The Sun is Good

This is a shortened version of an essay I wrote last month for the Cosmos Ventures fellowship. Cosmos is about grappling with how more sophisticated philosophical thinking can help us adapt to advancing AI technologies. I hope you like it!

Kevin Carlson

2025-05-09

CatColab 0.2: Wren

Today we’re excited to announce the first alpha release of CatColab 0.2: Wren. CatColab is software for making models of the world together.

Kevin Carlson

2025-02-05

Introducing CatColab

Today we’re excited to announce the first pre-alpha release of our new software CatColab 0.1: Hummingbird. CatColab is software for making models of the world together.

Kevin Carlson

2024-10-02