About

I am Eray Ulutaş. I born in Istanbul, in August 1998. And I raised in Istanbul. My childhood was colorful. Lived in a family owned apartment and I had the chance of having my elders around me as a child. Through interactions with them I inherited their way of looking at life. I think this is the reason many people see me as old fashioned today.

Many of my role models in the family was technicians. I remember that I admired their skills, and wanted to learn technical things myself. Toolbox of my father and grandfather used accompanied me in many hours of childplay. I dreamed of becoming an engineer when I grow up.

When I was 12 years old. My favourite uncle gifted me a computer. This was my first encounter with a computer. In the high school years, I teached myself C Programming through the K&R's "The C Programming Language", and then studied Lisp through famous "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" book of Abelson & Sussman. Lisp was my first encounter with symbolic programming, and REPL. Which I had no clue when I was just playing with them out of curiosity.

When the college years came, I decided to study Mechanical Engineering at Istanbul University. I wanted to learn more about physics, and mechanics. My grand aim was to understand control of a machine from ground up, from electrons, to software, and then to mechanics. I was able to finish this project as I graduated, and I had a pretty good mental model of how everything in this stack works by then.

In my mechanical engineering study, I always leaned toward computational aspects of things. I programmed simulators for fluids, and mechanisms. I aimed to learn feedback loops, control theory and electronics. I programmed microcontrollers and implemented communication protocols. With this knowledge after my graduation I started work as an Embedded Programming Engineer in Industrial Automation sector.

In my programming years, I kept reading and learning more about computers, operating systems and programming languages. I started to view computation as an universal and more abstract thing. I started to see parallel between human brain and computers. After ~5 years in programming, I decided that I want to understand more foundational aspects of these things and decided to switch into academia.

Now I am a researcher in the Computational Science & Engineering area. My primary interests are Computation, Data Science, and Mathematics. I want to understand the reality from the computational point of view. Inspect the relationships between mathematical models, and reality.

Thank you for reading. This is the story so far, I will update occasionally as life goes on.