Pieter Spaas, postdoc

Pieter is from Belgium and received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Hasselt University and KU Leuven respectively. He subsequently earned his PhD in 2019 from UC San Diego under the supervision of Professor Adrian Ioana, and was an Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCLA before moving to Copenhagen.

Pieter’s interests have mainly developed around operator algebras and ergodic theory. However, they extend to several adjacent areas as well, including group theory and descriptive set theory.

He is often motivated by questions about group actions, equivalence relations, and their associated operator algebras. For instance, he has studied the structure and classification of Cartan subalgebras, central sequence algebras, and (tensor) product decompositions of von Neumann algebras and countable Borel equivalence relations.

More recently, he has also worked on non-commutative ergodic theory, lifting properties of C*-algebras, and group stability, a concept that has found many applications in mathematics, physics, and computer science, and which intuitively asks whether approximate homomorphisms are close to genuine homomorphisms.

In Copenhagen, Pieter is looking forward to continuing working on related problems with new collaborators at the University, and to further broadening his horizons.

You can meet Pieter in office 04.2.09