About me

email	2a4945445e4b495e6a4b494b46464b584e04444f5e (PGP key)
address	Antonin Callard
	GREYC, Université de Caen
	6 Boulevard Maréchal Juin, 14000 Caen, France
office	S3-356, Campus 2, Université de Caen

My name is Antonin Callard. I am a third-year PhD student at Université de Caen (France) under the supervision of Pascal Vanier. I am in the AMACC team of the GREYC lab.

I study symbolic dynamical systems (e.g. subshifts) based on their computational, dynamical and topological properties. During my PhD, I try to understand soficity in multidimensional subshifts by using various dynamical and combinatoric/algorithmic notions (communication complexity, randomness, Kolmogorov complexity, computability theory…).

If you have complaints, comments, suggestions, or just want to chat about any of the things mentioned in this page, you can reach me via the email above or visit me in my office!

I studied theoretical computer science at ENS Paris-Saclay between 2018 and 2021. During my studies, I completed research internships under Mathieu Hoyrup (2019), Pascal Vanier (2020) and Benjamin Hellouin de Menibus (2021). I graduated from M2 MPRI during summer 2021, and I was a research visitor mentored by Ville Salo at the University of Turku (Finland) for the academic year 2021–2022. I feel deeply indebted to all of my previous advisors for their very kind supervisions.

I started my PhD at Université de Caen (France) in September 2022. My research focuses on subshifts, which are deeply fascinating objects that I study through a computational lens. Aside from (un)decidability results, I provide many example of subshifts that exhibit particular properties of interest (e.g. soficity, aperiodicity, mixingness) in somewhat creative constructions. Such topics being particularly open-ended, I enjoy exploring numerous perspectives. For example, group invariants (related to growth) of finitely and recursively presented groups seem to exhibit interesting computational parallels to entropies of subshifts: and I would very much like to understand why. As of late, I was lead to consider soficity in multidimensional subshifts: intuitively, patterns of size $n \times n$ in such subshifts can only communicate a linear $O(n)$ amount of information to the configurations they appear in. Using notions from communication complexity, Kolmogorov complexity and computability theory, I aim at formalizing this intuition.

Outside of research, my interests lie in movies, books, music, tabletop and video games (Celeste, Outer Wilds and Hollow Knight are all awesome, by the way), (Void) Linux-related stuff, long walks and (even longer) discussions with friends. I have deep gratitude for those who indulge with me in the time-consuming yet very enjoyable activities. 😃