Theodore Papamarkou
Founder & CEO at National Technical University of Athens
Athens, Attica, Greece
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTheodore Papamarkou is a mathematician-turned-software engineer and founder with 13 years of experience bridging research-grade statistics and production-ready numerical software. He has held academic and research positions across leading institutions (Cambridge, UCL, Glasgow, Manchester, Oak Ridge) and now leads PolyShape while serving as a visiting professor in Athens. Theodore is a hands-on contributor to high-impact open-source projects—most notably implementing core forward-mode AD in Julia's ForwardDiff and extending complex-number support in the Crystal language—bringing deep expertise in automatic differentiation, multivariate distributions, and statistical computation. His work combines rigorous PhD-level statistics with pragmatic engineering, producing tested implementations of multivariate t-distributions and differentiation primitives used by scientific software. Based in Athens, he maintains an actively updated research manuscript on Zenodo, signaling a commitment to reproducible, evolving scholarship alongside entrepreneurial and code-centric impact.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Mathematics at University of IoanninaDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Statistics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Statistics at University of Warwick
Github Skills (20)
algorithm10
algorithms10
programming-language10
crystal-lang10
data-science10
mathematics10
statistics10
complex-numbers10
math10
distributions10
data-structure10
calculus10
automatic-differentiation10
data-structures10
probability-distribution10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
JuliaDiff/ForwardDiff.jl
Apr 2013 - May 2015
Forward Mode Automatic Differentiation for Julia
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:123 commits, 2 PRs, 5 pushes in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Theodore primarily contributed to the core functionalities of the `forwarddiff.jl` library, which focuses on forward mode automatic differentiation in Julia. Their work included the initial implementation of the `ADForward` type and its related methods, along with operations such as +, -, *, /, sqrt, sin, cos, and more. They also refactored and improved the codebase by incorporating dual numbers and multivariate gradual differentiation techniques.
automatic-differentiationjuliacalculus
JuliaStats/Distributions.jl
Dec 2013 - Jun 2014
A Julia package for probability distributions and associated functions.
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:14 commits, 3 PRs, 54 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Theodore's primary contributions involve the development and testing of multivariate t-distribution functionality within the `distributions.jl` package. They implemented the core `GenericMvTDist` structure, related methods for logpdf, gradloglik, and random sampling, and added tests to validate the implementation. The user's work expanded the package's capabilities for statistical analysis and modeling, focusing on probability distributions.
juliastatisticsdata-scienceprobability-distributions
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