People / Owen Lynch

Research Software Engineer

About

Owen Lynch is a mathematician who sometimes writes software. He holds a MSc in Mathematics (concentration: Probability and Statistics) from Utrecht University and a BSc in Mathematics from Brown University. Fundamentally, Owen is interested in two things. The first thing is user interface design, specifically user interface design for mathematics. This ranges from streamlining mathematical theories to make them cleaner and easier to understand, to figuring out how to do math on a computer effectively, to actual web interfaces for mathematical objects. The second thing is statistical mechanics: how does predictability emerge from many small parts that we have only imperfect information about? Hopefully the first thing should end up making the second thing easier to answer.

Personal website

https://owenlynch.org/

GitHub

@olynch

Blog posts

The three functions of a name: reference, identity and display

This is a brief little post about naming. Naming is well-known to be one of the hardest problems in computer science. But why is this the case? I claim that one of the reasons is because often naming systems are being asked to do triple-duty; a single name is used to perform the three functions of …

Owen Lynch

2025-05-07

Declarative Models and Collaborative Modeling

Although we at the Topos Institute spend much of our days applying category theory, underlying our activities is a philosophy around the activity of science and engineering that is not explicitly category-theoretic in nature. In this blog post, we lay out some of the core ideas of this philosophy…

Owen Lynch

2024-10-31

A Retrospective on the Oxford–Topos Meeting

Sam Staton, Paolo Perrone and I organized a small meeting between Topos Institute and the Oxford CS department. It was kind of like a workshop, but because of the short time frame that we planned it on and limited funding, we didn’t invite all the people we’d like to invite or have it open to…

Owen Lynch

2024-03-13

Introducing InterTypes

Announcing the first version of InterTypes: a package for cross-language serialization for ADTs and ACSets

Owen Lynch

2023-11-14

Towards a Research Program on Compositional World-Modeling

In this post, we lay out a vision and challenge for using category theory to build tools for understanding systems at a global scope.

davidad , Owen Lynch

2023-06-15

Symbolic presentations of dynamical systems

A follow-up to “Algebraic Geometry for the Working Programmer”, this post explains a category-theoretic approach to symbolic open dynamical systems.

Owen Lynch

2023-05-08

Imperative Programming with Poly

Category theory has been applied fruitfully to functional programming for decades, leading some to think that functional programming represents the one true way of doing math on a computer. However, the stubborn fact that the internals of computers and the world itself are both stateful means that…

Owen Lynch

2023-04-05

Algebraic geometry for the working programmer

In this series of posts, we investigate the duality between algebra and geometry in order to develop new types of lenses. In this first post, we review some basic ideas about algebraic geometry that will be needed in the coming posts.

Owen Lynch

2023-03-23

Compositional Thermostatics

In this post, we explore the compositionality of thermodynamic systems at equilibrium (thermostatic systems). The main body of this uses no category theory, and reviews the physics of thermostatic systems in a formalism that puts entropy first. Then there is a brief teaser at the end showing how…

Owen Lynch

2021-09-09

Get to know our Summer Research Associates

We’re excited to welcome our 2021 summer research associates to our Berkeley campus! This summer we have Sophie Libkind, Owen Lynch, David Jaz Myers, and Nelson Niu joining our work on connected intelligence and model-based scientific computing. They bring new exciting energy and ideas, and we’re…

Brendan Fong, Sophie Libkind, David Jaz Myers, Owen Lynch, Nelson Niu

2021-07-19