User:Oheim

I'm Oliver Heimlich, you can contact me at oheim@posteo.de.

About me

In 2011 I have graduated in computer science (minor: mathematics) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. For some years I have worked as an analyst and programmer for a consulting company specialized on software governance. Today I am a lead developer at a software producer for the German finance sector.

My hobbies are aquaristics, cycling and free software.

I have been a user of free software and linux since approximately 1999, but GNU Octave is the first project which I contribute to.

My contribution to GNU Octave

After my exit from academia, I could no longer legally use my educational license of MATLAB and its toolboxes, which I had used for research [1] [2]. I continued working on my thesis' topic [3] and—as a hobby—put up a website showing off some functions from my thesis [4]. At first I experimented with integrating my MATLAB based functions via a webservice for the computational work, but since this was illegal, I had to reimplement my functions as well as some required interval arithmetic routines in PHP from scratch. Yes, I really did this, but it was no fun because the language isn't made for it and I had to compromise a lot.

In 2014, since I was still subscribed to the IEEE interval standard working group [5], I noticed that the standard document was nearly finished and conforming implementations were still to be done. Also I noticed a request by the FSF for supporting GNU Octave as a high priority project with free replacements of MATLAB toolboxes [6]. I followed their call and created the interval package, which soon became the first complete implementation of the preliminary standard IEEE 1788 (finally, my silly PHP exercise payed out).