Buck Shlegeris is an undergraduate computer science student at ANU (and also the Director of Sponsorship for CompCon 2013!). His interests are varied, and range from the highly theoretical (How hard is the median instance of the halting problem?) to the practical (How should I make this GUI have a right click menu?). In his spare time, he writes music for his band Buck et al.

Buck will be speaking on The algebraic behaviour of data structures. His talk description is below:

"Data structures have a rich algebraic structure which hasn't really been properly explored. To start with, I'll explain the isomorphism between set size expressions and immutable data structures. I'll explain how differentiation leads to the zipper over a mutable data type, and what zippers are.

Then, we'll get to the interesting stuff. There's a correspondence between data structures and context-free grammars, which is really cool.

In software engineering, we talk about contracts and class invariants. We can carefully select data structures such that these class invariants and contracts are ensured by the type system.

We can describe problems in combinatorics as questions about abstract data structures. I'll exposit this.

Most of this presentation is not original. However, the isomorphism between this algebra and context free grammar is original as far as I know."