I'm on Leave!
I'm currently on a break from academia and have moved to Helsinki for family reasons. I'm working as an AI Fellow in the
Featurespace Innovation Lab. I'm afraid this means I'm unable to take on new PhD students or postdocs, or do any refereeing work. In early 2024 I went down something of a rabbit hole after spotting the temperature button on ChatGPT, wondering what it was, and then wondering why it wasn't defined the way I would have defined it, and am now working on lots of problems at the intersection of machine learning and ergodic theory. My university email address still works, and I'm always happy to receive academic related emails, but my replies may be slower than usual.
About Me:
I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester working in the
dynamical systems group.
My current main interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and ergodic theory. Previously, I spent many years working on applications of thermodynamic formalism to problems in fractal geometry and number theory, and in particular in the study of Bernoulli convolutions and self-affine sets.
Fringe interests include percolation and the graph reconstruction conjecture.
Previously I was an EPSRC funded postdoc at the University of St Andrews working with
Kenneth Falconer and before that I worked with
Karma Dajani at the
University of Utrecht. I completed my PhD at the University of Warwick in March 2011 under the
supervision of
Mark Pollicott.
My
thesis was on thermodynamic
formalism for symbolic dynamical systems.
I'm originally from Derby and have also lived in Coventry, Utrecht, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Thessaloniki, York and Manchester. I regularly take part in
Parkrun and am currently struggling to learn the Greek language. My wife
Aspa is a senior researcher at the VATT Institute for Economic Research in Helsinki.
Publications and Preprints:
Please see
here for my publications and preprints. Click
here for
my Google Scholar profile.
PhD and Postdoc Opportunities:
I'm not looking to take on any more PhD students or postdocs at the moment, but please feel free to get in touch and I may be able to direct you towards colleagues in the dynamics group. Previously I mentored
Leticia Pardo Simon,
Lawrence Lee and
Demi Allen as Postdocs, and Alex Batsis, Peej Ingarfeld, Alden Paige and Milo Edwardes as PhD students.
Tom Kempton
School of Mathematics
The University of Manchester
Manchester
M13 9PL
United Kingdom
Office number 2.218
thomas.kempton@manchester.ac.uk
0044 161 3063683
