Lars is a pure mathematician by training, and holds a PhD in the same. He has spent several years teaching and doing postgraduate research in arithmetic number theory at Cambridge University in the UK, and at Regensburg University in Germany. He worked for ten years as a Lead Software Architect for an international IT company. His job, amongst other things, was the application of mathematical optimization techniques to the paper industry and web framework development (using mostly C#, JavaScript and TypeScript). His present position is that of Director of Education at Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), working on blockchain technology and teaching Haskell and other subjects. He has been interested in programming since his early teens, and he loves learning new programming languages and paradigms - in particular those that offer a radically new way of looking at problems and of thinking about solutions. He is especially fascinated by functional programming and its promise of elegant, bug-free code that can be developed rapidly.