I am Keir Finlow-Bates, the CEO and founder of Chainfrog Oy, and that’s me on the left next to one of the few satchels owned by Paul Erdős, a mathematician whose work I deeply respect and admire. I have an MA and BA in mathematics and engineering from Cambridge, and a PhD in mathematics and education from London, but unfortunately unlike Erdős I don’t have over 1,500 published papers to my name.
I do, however, have 42 granted patents, and another 10 or so applications pending, in technical areas as diverse as navigation, cryptography, data storage and transfer, blockchain technology, cameras, wireless LAN, RFID tags, the Internet of Things, sensors, crowdsourcing data, and reducing power consumption.
I’ve spent the last two decades working in the computing and information technology industry, mainly as a test automation engineer and manager. About seven years ago a colleague introduced me to Bitcoin, and I’ve been fascinated by blockchain concepts and cryptography ever since.
Although I’m British I live in Finland with my family, in the beautiful town of Kangasala, next to a lake and in the lee of an esker. I have a surprisingly large Erdős number of 6, due to my only academic publications being with my PhD supervisor, Stephen Lerman.