In this episode me and Dan Plyukhin get together to have a heartfelt conversation. We start by talking about our experiences with meditation, and how it has helped us to have a more balanced work-life experience. Then the conversation shifts to comment about the current situation of the job market. Both in academia and in industry. We talk about strategies to reach out to professors and our view on the use of AI in general, and of course we talk about our current research interests.

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In this episode of the Type Theory Forall podcast, we are joined by Valeria de Paiva, a Brazilian mathematician and logician whose work has had a lasting influence on category theory, type theory, and the foundations of logic. She is also a co-founder of the Topos Institute, where she continues to explore deep connections between mathematics, logic, computation, and the sciences.

Valeria completed her PhD at Cambridge in the mid-1980s. Even today, pursuing an academic career abroad from Brazil is challenging; doing so at that time — and as a woman — required exceptional determination and resilience. Her trajectory alone already makes her an inspiring figure in the field.

This episode is one of the most technically focused conversations on category theory we have ever had on TTFA. Coming from a strong mathematics background, Valeria has worked extensively on categorical semantics, logical interpretations, and the interface between logic, computation, and language. As a result, the discussion goes deep into categorical ideas and their role in type theory.

Valeria is also the founder of the Women in Logic initiative, which enabled a serious and thoughtful discussion about gender inequality in logic, type theory, and computer science. The conversation is grounded not only in abstract principles, but in decades of concrete work building communities, workshops, and long-lasting support structures for women in the field.

Overall, this episode brings together technical depth, personal history, and a broader reflection on what it means to build a healthier and more inclusive research culture in logic and programming languages.

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Andrej Bauer has done his PhD at CMU under Dana Scott, and he stands right on the edge between mathematics and computer science. During our conversation it just feels that he can just go on in depth about any topic remotely related to Type Theory and Programming Languages.

Andrej is the person who organized for the The Proof Assistants stack exchange. He has an incredible blog that’s always a great resource to learn Type Theory and Programming Languages Theory. He also has an incredible series of summer school lectures on effect handlers.

But more specifically today we talk about Constructivism, Dialectica, Effect Handlers and AI. I’m sure you guys are gonna love it!

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Raghav Malik, has just defended his PhD on the topic of compilers for privacy-preserving computation, and that's a good chunk of our conversation.

He has also spent some years in grad school going down the rabbit hole to actually learn Category Theory in depth and from first principles, so I was deieing to ask him if category theory is really all that to learn the foundations of PL. In other words, does learning category theory really make you a better PL researcher?

Then, of course, I wouldn’t finish this episode without asking him how he coped with Mental Health during his PhD Journey.

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Francille Zhuang is an undergrad at Purdue University and has been doing research with Benjamin Delaware and Patrick Lafontaine. In this episode we talk about her early research experiences on Property Based Testing, and we go through all the necessary information for applying for graduate school in Programming Languages in the US.

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Mike Sperber is the CEO of Active Group, a company designed for Counseling, Development and Training in functional programming. He is a co-organizer of Bob Konf and FunArch, the Co-founder of the leading german blog on functional programming. Member of the Editorial Board of the JFP. Part of the R6RS, the 6th revised report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme.

In our conversation we talk about C, Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Scheme and his involvement with the R6RS. His views on mathematics and formal methods as languages, his views on the use of Functional Programming in the Industry, his thoughts of how Object Oriented Programming is dead. Macros, hygienic macros and much more!

We also talk about BobKonf and FunArch as amazing confereces on Functional Programming and their design and archtechture. BobKonf currently has a call for talks open and goes until november 17th.

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Philip Wadler is a well known, celebrated and recognized researcher in the field especially for his unique ability to explain complex ideas in a simple and elegant way. He got his Bachelor in 1977 at Stanford, his Masters in 1979 and his PhD in 1984 both at CMU. In 2023, he was awarded the distinguished honor of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, joining the ranks of scientific greats such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

Wadler describes himself as someone who likes to bring theory into practice, and practice into theory. In this episode, we talk about his prolific research, the story behind Monads and Type Classes, Category Theory and Homotopy Type Theory.

Throughout our conversation, in response to my eagerness to understand the philosophy and method behind his remarkable papers, he repeatedly emphasizes that the whole point of science is clearly communicating ideas so that others can build upon them.

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Derek Dreyer is a professor at the Max Planck Institute, in 2024 he was awarded the ACM Fellowship, in 2017 he got the ACM Sigplan Robin Milner Young Researcher Award. And has participated or lead greatly influential work, such as the RustBelt Project and Iris.

In this episode Derek shares his experience going to Grad School at CMU, how even a great research as himself has fallen pray to the impostor syndrome and how to cope with it. Throughout the conversation he makes beautiful parallels between music and academic papers, and how the work of a researcher is similar to that of an artist an many aspects. He also gives us a few tips about how to become a better academic writer. And of course, we also talked about Rust and the history about formally verifying its type system.

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