Christopher Dimech

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Christopher Dimech
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Born14 May 1977
NationalityMaltese
CitizenshipMalta
EducationBachelor's degree in Applied Geophysics
Alma materUniversity of Malta
OccupationMathematician

Christopher Dimech (born 14 May 1977) is a Maltese Mathematician working in the mathematical sciences and related fields[1]. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Applied Geophysics from the University of Malta. He began work on detecting hydrocarbons and reducing drilling risk for the Government of Malta, completing a Master's degree in Geophysical Elastic Wavefield Modeling in 2004. He went to England to work with explorationists at Robertson Research International which provided independent research and consultancy services for understanding play and basin scale petroleum geology worldwide.

In 2008, Dimech was invited to continue astrophysical research at the the oldest volcanology institute in the world, the Vesuvius Observatory (Italian: Osservatorio Vesuviano) in Naples, Southern Italy's largest city. He started experimenting, trying various statistical techniques used by the surveillance centre for monitoring the three volcanic areas of Campania's Mount Vesuvius, the Phlegrean Fields and Ischia. In particular, he adapted Bayesian imaging techniques initiated by the Head of the Seismological Laboratory Aldo Zollo.

At the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Italian: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia), Dimech met Luca D'Auria, who had previously developed the nonlinear bayesian geophysical inverse software using the GNU Compiler Collection. D'Auria later became the director of the Volcanic Surveillance Area of the Volcanological Institute of the Canary Islands. Dimech quickly gained the attention of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Community, although his work was widely seen as hard to understand since his vocabulary frequently utilises mathematical formalisms. In 2017, he founded the Gnu Behistun Software Package Tools. Since 2013, he began advocating the adoption of free software and holding political discourse against software patents, digital restrictions, and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away the freedom of computer users[2].

Dimech came to prominence for his legal comments regarding the GNU General Public License, where he was quoted by Tim Anderson for The Register,[3] a British technology news source whose stories are frequently cited by major world media groups. He has been instrumental in highlighting that many geoscience endeavors operate as independent state, industrial or university units with little or no coordination between them. Because of the restrictive systems within which they operate, few cooperative research programs have developed and only a fraction of their output reaches other earth scientists, engineers, and the public. Consequently, technological know-how is chiefly available only in industrial countries.

References

  1. "Geomathematics and Computation". University of Malta. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  2. "Digital Rights. Free Licensing". University of Malta. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  3. Tim Anderson. "Code contributions to GCC no longer have to be assigned to FSF, says compiler body". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2021-11-14.

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