daniel issing

all models are wrong, but some are fun to play with.

about me

Hi there and thanks for dropping by here! I'm Daniel, a researcher in global health and development. My trajectory has been anything but linear, and over the last decade I have been doing research on obscure mathematical objects called quantum algebras, ran a leadership seminar out an old leprosy ward in Nepal, and developed machine learning algorithms to catch insurance fraudster. Oh, and I almost ended up doing a PhD in neuroeconomics... but see below.

I'm a generalist at heart, a jack of many trades but master of few. I enjoy coding and math problems, reading multiple books at once, and writing about things big and small that capture my imagination. Such a temperament reliable gets in the way of becoming a true subject matter expert in any domain, but I like to imagine that it lets me spot patterns and connections that the specialists may miss. If there's a thread connecting all of the above, it's probably just a stubborn commitment to understanding how things actually work, whether that's AI, quantum computing or programs to alleviate global poverty.

And why limit my curiosity to intellectual pursuits? As an avid trail runner & cyclist, I'm always keen ti find new wats to explore my limits, some of which I've highlighted below. And I love connecting these exploits with traveling to new places. Scroll on to learn more!

experience & education

Senior Research Associate

GiveWell

As a researcher at GiveWell, I explore new areas of grantmaking to expand the organization's footprint and enable them to unlock new funding opportunities. GiveWell focuses on identifying the most cost-effective programs to ensure that donations have the highest impact on global well-being. This work includes assessing the evidence behind programs, modeling disease burden, learning about the strengths and weaknesses of the implmenting organization, diving into M&E data, among many other things.

Data Science Team Lead

Shift Technology

At Shift, I helped develop and customize an AI-powered fraud detection software for insurance companies. I oversaw a team that worked with major insurers in the UK and Germany, with the goal of supporting their fraud teams to identify suspicious cases quickly and reliably. You can find a couple of interesting case studies to see how this works at this link.

Asia Program Manager

Students For Liberty

After volunteering with them for many years, during which I organized numerous conferences, talks and seminars and launched a student magazine, I joined SFL's staff full-time to expand their chapters and activities across Asia. I coordinated with student groups from Afghanistan to Indonesia, helping establish new chapters, training local organizers, and adapting programming for diverse cultural contexts. I'm very grateful for the many inspiring individuals I met during that time, who went above and beyond to promote a message of freedom, peaceful coexistence and open dialogue in very challenging or outrightly hostile environments.

MSc, Theoretical & Mathematical Physics

Ludwig Maximilian University Munich & LAPTh

I was accepted into the joint LMU & TUM elite master course on theoretical and mathematical physics for my graduate studies. My thesis (which you can find here) was written under the supervision of Luc Frappat and Eric Ragoucy at the Labortoire d'Annecy-le-Vieux de Physique Théorique (LAPTh). The collaboration resulted in a paper in which we showed how to constructed the center of an elliptic algebra that's relevant to the study of quantum integrable systems. If all of this sounds like mumbo jumbo to you, here's my attempt to provide a non-technical, high-level overview of that work.

BSc, Physics

Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg & Carleton University, Ottawa

I went into physics for its promise to offer a glimpse into the fabric of reality at its most fundamental level. My specialization was quantum mechanics, or, more precisely, lattice models for which the Schrödinger equation could be solved analytically. My thesis, written under the supervision of Tilman Enss, dealt with non-equilibrium dynamics (quantum quenches) for just such systems.

As part of my undergrad degree, I also spent a year in Canada, which was a formative experience for me. I can't recommend studying abroad enough to broaden your horizon and learn to be independent.

coding

A selection on personal projects I've been working on. You can find more examples on my GitHub page.

LLM Mathematical Reasoning Benchmark

How good are state-of-the-art AI models at solving coding challenges that require the clever application of mathematical insights lest the program runs forever?

For this project, I pitted three LLMs against each other and challenged them to generate scripts for Project Euler problems of ever-increasing complexity. The results were surprising in many ways.

View on GitHub →

Personal Race Time Predictor

A Monte Carlo model that predicts race times based on past performance and course elevation profiles for each leg of the race.

The app provides automatic integration with the Strava API to provide personalized pacing strategies. It also lets use visualize each segment and provides valuable input for your crew.

View on GitHub →

traveling

The earth is just one small planet in our solar system, which itself makes up but a tiny part of one of trillions of galaxies. And yet, I've seen preciously little of it. This map serves as a reminder that there are still many places left to be explored, and many things I don't know. Scroll down for some highlights from places I did get a chance to visit!.

0 countries - 0% of the world

Near the Col du Petit St. Bernard, France

Coastal Redwoods near Santa Cruz, United States

running & cycling

There are many ways to test one's limit, but for me, nothing beats endurance sports. Especially when you can combine it with breathtaking views! Ever since I ran my first half marathon at age 16, I've been hooked, and have participated in (and finished) over 35 ultramarathons. Below is a small selection of the most daunting, beautiful and at times soul-crushing exploits I foolishly signed up for.

click to read more

gr 20

The GR20 is one of the most famous long-distance hikes in France, traversing Corsica from north to south. It's also famously rocky and technical, especially the northern section. People usually hike it two weeks, but a friend and I decided we were going to try finish it in four days, carrying all of our gear with us. It was rough.

click to read more

ultra trail du mont blanc

The atmosphere during the first 40k is absolutely bonkers, and the arrival after 170km is pure goosebumps. Say what you will about the UTMB group, but there's a reason why everyone wants to run it. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time, money and luck to get into, so I doubt I'll be able to come back for a second lap. Strava link.

click to read more

eiger ultra trail

ThIis remains my longest race to date. The route wraps around the Eiger massive and includes lots of glaciers. With 260km and around 18,000m of vertical gain, this one is no joke, and we slept very little during those three days and two nights we were out on the trails. Race report.

click to read more

via alpina by bike

The Via Alpina is a long-distance trek follows the Alps from Monaco to Muggia near Trieste, traversing 8 different countries. For our honeymoon, my wife and I created a bike-friendly version of this trip and spent a month climbing pass after pass. Travel log.

writing

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book recommendations

I love getting book recommendations from other people, so it's only fair I share mine. Of course, such a list is never static, not only because it - hopefully - keeps growing. Tastes change, things that seemed groundbreaking start feeling banal (or wrong), and memory isn't always as reliable as we'd like to think. All that is to say that the selection below is necessarily a snapshot of a particular moment in time, but I don't think you'd regret picking up any of these. Click for a brief review!

fiction

The Books of Jacob

Olga Tokarczuk

The novel starts off slow and it takes a while to get into the flow, but the effort is well worth is. An absolute masterwork, for which fortunately and excellent English translation exists. It's no small feat to write 900+ pages about the life of an obscure 18th century Jewish mystic and have the reader ask for more at the end.

The Feast of the Goat

Mario Vargas Llosa

I've never read a Vargas Llosa novel I didn't like, but his exploration of power and corruption through the lens of Rafa Trujillo's dictatorship may be the best of them all. Vargas Llosa was well-known as one of the powerful critics of left-wing authoritarianism in Latin America, but The Feast of the Goat proves that he wasn't ignorant of the illiberal, repressive movement on the right. A gripping read from start to finish.

Les Bienveillants

Jonathan Littell

This is not the book you pack for a sumemr vacation on a tropical beach. It is an attempt to pour the "banality of evil" into literary form by revisiting the horrors of the Second World War through the eyes of an SS officer. Dense, full of gratuitous, mind-numbing cruelty, Littell has created a tome that is designed to make your stomach churn.

Der Zauberberg

Thomas Mann

I read "The Magic Mountain" way back in high school, and the novel has had a special place in my heart every since. It is a nostalgic work, portraying the sanatorium as a microcosm of European culture and thought before the continent descended into the madness of two world wars. And, of course, it's the paradigmatic TB novel, a disease that has faded from collective memory in the West but continues to claims the lives of more than a million people each year.

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

I like to think of Franzen as the 21st century reincarnation of John Updike, and both have certainly contributed much to the tradition of the suburban novel. The conflicts that form the backbone of The Corrections will hit close to home for many readers, and their very futility makes the book so gripping. Read it for glimmers of hope amidst much self-imposed misery, inexplicable behaviors that only gradually begin to make sense, and astute psychological observations of emotional turmoil.

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren

To understand what it means to seek power for power's sake, look no further than Warren's fictionalized account of Lousiana's governor Huey Lewis. There are things a novel manages to capture that no study of populism, however comprehensive, could convey.

The Cider House Rules

John Irving

Irving is an excellent storyteller - not because he's groundbreaking or innovative (David Copperfield is an obvious influence, as is Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), but simply because he's perfected the craft of telling a great story. It's probably the best and most nuanced literary treatment of abortion, neither shying away from judgment nor surpressing its complexities.

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

Classics often require time and patience to appreciate... anyway.

Faust I

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What Hamlet is to England, Don Quixote is to Spain and The Divine Comedy is to Italy, the first Faust is to Germany. Of course you should read it in the original, if you can. Unlike some of the other classics, it's fairly short and actually quite accesible.

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

It's everything you'd expect it to be (long, convoluted and hard to digest) and it took me several attempts to finish it, the first dating back to early this year. Even when I finally started liking it (after a few hundred pages), it still took me several weeks more to get through. But even though I really, really hated it at times, it didn't let me go, and I still find myself browsing the book's even more expansive Wiki to see all the things I missed when reading it.

La Peste

Albert Camus

PLACEHOLDER.

La Carte et le Territoire

Michel Houelllebecq

PLACEHOLDER.

The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco

PLACEHOLDER.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera

PLACEHOLDER.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz

PLACEHOLDER.

When we cease to understand the world

Benjamin Labatut

PLACEHOLDER.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

PLACEHOLDER.

American Pastoral

Philip Roth

A harrowing read. There sure are books that portray greater evil and tragedy than this Newark family drama, but for reasons I can't quite articulate, watching the life of a successful businessman and father unravel through no fault of his own (or so it appears). Roth's best novel, in my mind (and he wrote many excellent ones).

non-fiction

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber

This wonderful little book sets out to answer two questions: Why did reason evolve in the first place? And why does it so often lead us astray? Their approach is an engaging and sometimes controversial defense of the claims that reason can only be understood in a social context.

The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt

Politics and religion are the two topics not to be discussed in polite society. What this piece of advice is based on and how we might be able to do better in an increasingly polarized socierty is the topic of Haidt's classic book. Not everything in it has stood the test of time (e.g. the Moral Foundations theory seems to have replciation issues), but it remains a standout work to help us appreciate our own blind spots a little more.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas Hofstadter

Take it from Martin Gardner: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event." The field of AI has changed tremendously since GEB was first published, but the book has aged surprisingly well. A must-read for anyone who is fascinating by how mind emerged from matter.

Why We Get Sick

Randolph Nesse & George Williams

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, and illnesses & diseases are no exception to that rule. Of course the insight that pathogens, too, struggle mightily to increase their fitness, is not novel, but the question why the human body hasn't found its way around non-infectious diseases (especially mental illness) remains a puzzling one. I credit this book with giving me a new and refreshing outlook on medicine.

The Secret of Our Success

Joseph Henrich

PLACEHOLDER.

Seeing Like a State

James C. Scott

PLACEHOLDER.

The Gene

Siddharta Mukherjee

This is quite simply the best book for curious laypeople to get a deeper understanding of genetics. Mukherjee is one of the most gifted science writers of our age, and here he does a wonderful job of relying complicated concepts in an accesible (but not simplistic) way.

The Rational Optimist

Matt Ridley

Optimists are often accused of having an irrational, panglossian view way of looking at the world, but Ridley makes the case that it's the pessimists who are mistaken and selective in their assessment. There is now a whole community dedicated to the study of progress, but The Rational Optimist still strikes me as the best exposition of this view.

Bureaucracy

James Q. Wilson

PLACEHOLDER.

Honeybee Democracy

Thomas D. Seeley

In most everyday sitations, a honeybee is a nuisance, and few people other than professional melittologists think there's much to be gained from studying them. Seeley's remarkable accomplishment is that he demonstrates how fascinating things get when you look at the decision-making processes of a swarm as a whole, with important implications for neuroscience and collective action theories. If nothing else, knowing how a swarm finds a new home is excellent cocktail party knowledge.

The Machinery Of Freedom

David D. Friedman

David Friedman strikes me as the sharpest thinker among the more radical libertarians. You don't have to buy his arguments in favor of market anarchism to find the book thought-provoking. What I particularly liked about it is that, even though his challenges for political philosophers of all stripes are excellent, he's very open about the shortcomings of his preferred political system.

Albion's Seed

David Hackett Fisher

PLACEHOLDER.

The Sleepwalkers

Christopher Clark

PLACEHOLDER.

Lost in Math

Sabine Hossenfelder

PLACEHOLDER.

The Elephant in the Brain

Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler

PLACEHOLDER.

The Evolution of God

Robert Wright

PLACEHOLDER.

Poor Economics

Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo

Poor Economics is, at its core, a highly empathic attempt to come to grips with the seemingly paradoxical and self-defeating everyday choices of the world’s poor. It’s also a prime example of a work that engages those who disagree with its perspective in good faith. Not to mention that it has also been a major driver of the credibility revolution in development economics. No small feat for such a relatively slim volume!

The Unfolding of Language

Guy Deutscher

PLACEHOLDER.

get in touch

Have a question, got feedback or simply want to get in touch? I'd love to hear from you!