Dr. Jasper David Cornelis van de Kreeke is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Mathematics at UC Berkeley. Van de Kreeke finished his PhD in mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests lie in stability conditions and deformations in mirror symmetry.
As someone who finished his master’s at the age of 19, he said he was always fascinated by problems presented by math.
“I was always in a sort of a lab environment because my father was a chemist,” he said. Van de Kreeke came to Berkeley to explore the theme of homological mirror symmetry, which is a method of connecting two different versions of string theory, in hopes to strengthen the research he did in the Netherlands.
One of his supervisors, mathematician and physicist Mina Aganagic’s work drew him to the scholarship that her research provided. “She has made such an enormous effort, during the past 20 years, to learn the meaning of the physical phenomena in mathematics,” he said. They are working on making mathematical language possible for understanding physics, which helps express physics in mathematical terms.
“That’s a great deal because this way you can bridge a gap between the physicists and mathematicians, who keep developing interesting theories,” he further explained.
One of the reasons he chose to do mathematics is because it makes him think and handle problems at hand methodically. “You cannot just go to the lab and throw an experiment. You know the experiment first happens in your head,” he said. "What's more: I love the academic environment, as I can make a difference in the way people think about mathematics."
When he was younger, like many math students, Van de Kreeke aspired to win the Fields Medal some day. “It’s like the Nobel prize in mathematics,” he said. But as his postdoc research deepened, his youthful ambitions transformed into more practical goals. “When I was in my younger years in the Ph.D., I tried to create more like a Theory of Everything,” he said. “But that’s not possible.”
Now, Van de Kreeke works on individual, concrete problems, looking for ways to connect algebra and geometry. “I am looking forward to solving as many problems as I can,” he said.