In this episode, Chris Rackauckas and Michael Tiemann welcome back Firoozeh Dastur, a theoretical mathematician and PhD candidate from Germany working on tropical geometry. This marks the first time someone has returned to the Julia Dispatch podcast! Firoozeh shares her journey from Pakistan to Germany, her pivot from K3 surfaces to tropical geometry, and how she discovered Julia during the pandemic. She explains what tropical geometry is, her early struggles with Julia, and how the Julia Slack community became crucial to her learning process. The conversation then shifts to her work on computational algebra and HPC workflows, where she discusses the frustrations with existing HPC tools that led her to develop DistributedWorkflows.jl. She introduces us to Petri nets as an alternative to DAGs for managing cyclic workflows and explains how her package aims to make HPC accessible to everyone. Firoozeh also shares insights about overcoming perfectionism in open source development, the importance of releasing early (inspired by Airbnb's launch story), and her thoughts on differential equations as Turing complete systems.

Firoozeh Dastur is a theoretical mathematician specializing in algebraic and tropical geometry with a strong focus on leveraging computer algebra systems for advanced mathematical research. Her other interests include high-performance computing (HPC) tools, with a particular goal of making distributed computing accessible to all domain scientists. As a passionate educator, Firoozeh is committed to fostering an inclusive learning environment that empowers the next generation of researchers and innovators. In her spare time, she develops Julia libraries that reflect her interests in distributed computing and computer algebra systems.

DistributedWorkflows.jl: https://github.com/JuliaServices/DistributedWorkflows.jl

Julia Slack community: https://julialang.org/slack/

NEMO.jl: https://github.com/Nemocas/Nemo.jl

Oscar.jl: https://github.com/oscar-system/Oscar.jl

SPACK: https://spack.io/

Recorded on: 2025/05/20

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

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