Hello, I’m Tom.

I am a DPhil stu­dent at the Mathematical Institute, in the University of Oxford. I am a mem­ber of the Centre for Topological Data Analysis where I am jointly su­per­vised by Heather Harrington and Ulrike Tillmann.

My aca­d­e­mic in­ter­ests lie pre­dom­i­nantly in ap­plied al­ge­braic topol­ogy, sto­chas­tic topol­ogy and ma­chine learn­ing. In my spare time, I’m a keen rock climber, scuba diver and bread baker.

Thomas Chaplin standing in front of the Hawaiian earring sculpture at the Unviersity of Warwick

Research

The fo­cus of my re­search to date is un­der­stand­ing the role that di­rec­tion­al­ity can play in tra­di­tional, topo­log­i­cal data analy­sis pipelines. Directed graphs arise nat­u­rally in a range of ap­pli­ca­tions; the de facto TDA ap­proach is to ig­nore the di­rec­tion of each edge and study the un­der­ly­ing undi­rected graph. Naturally, this loses a lot of in­for­ma­tion which might be use­ful. If you’d like to read more about this work, please have a look at my re­search page.


Blog

I am also an en­thu­si­as­tic soft­ware de­vel­oper, with a par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est and pro­fes­sional ex­pe­ri­ence in web de­vel­op­ment. My blog con­tains write-ups for some of my more in­ter­est­ing side-pro­jects, along­side ar­ti­cles dis­cussing de­vel­op­ment tools I like, and my other hob­bies. For more re­cent work and source code, head over to my GitHub.