Gulce Kardes

Gülce was born and raised in Izmir, a town on the Aegean shore with cultural connectedness both to the east and the west, which allowed her to reflect on many complexities of life early on. She is zealous about understanding the role of “structure” in “complexity” and identifying the properties of a system that make it more complex than others, and using the methods of physics and theoretical computer science in doing so.

Gülce is currently a second year PhD student in computer science at University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is advised by Joshua Grochow and Rafael Frongillo. In computer science, she approaches the question of structure and complexity from the perspective of computational complexity or hardness. As an initial step towards understanding how the mathematical structures of abstract problems relate to their hardness, she is working with harmonic analysis on the binary cube to read off the structural (combinatorial) properties of Boolean functions which vary in complexity.

At SFI, Gülce is collaborating with David Krakauer, David Wolpert and Joshua Grochow, on formalising resource tradeoffs in collective computation models via mathematical considerations rooted in computational complexity and communication complexity.

Prior to her PhD studies, Gülce received her BSc degree in physics from University of Leipzig in 2022, with concentration on stochastic thermodynamics. She also had the privilege to be a UCR of SFI in 2019, and then work at the Kavli Institute in Norway and ICTP in Italy.

When she is not doing maths on paper, she loves seeing it in Ikebana, Go, and literature, or some other pleasing combinatorial game which weaves the possibilities implicit in its own material.