Hello!
I'm Peter Potts. I went to Reed's School before studying for a Bachelor's in Mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, followed by a Master's in Neural Networks and a PhD in Mathematical Computing at Imperial College London. In 1998 I cofounded Pole Star, introducing the first online sea charts and building satellite-based maritime tracking technology that's still going strong nearly three decades on. After emigrating from the UK to Canada in 2003 and then to California in 2012, I worked at QuanticMind, KIXEYE, and Token, building large-scale distributed systems in Scala, before joining Apple in 2016, where I've spent the last decade working on large-scale mapping systems and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Alongside all that, a childhood interest in chemistry has reawakened — I'm working through an entire chemistry degree syllabus, with one long-term ambition: contributing to research into the origin of life. I'm married to Maria, originally from Peru, and we have a daughter, Sabrina. I'm also the HOA President of St. Matthews Place, a community of 34 condominiums. You can read more at LinkedIn.
- Atheism — why I don't believe, and why indoctrination is the real obstacle to clear thinking.
- Neural Networks — my Master's work on how much a neural network can actually remember.
- Exact Arithmetic — my PhD: representing real numbers with infinite precision using Mobius transformations.
- Chemistry — organic and physical chemistry, in service of a bigger question: the origin of life.