This is me. In York. I like hats.

I’m Chris Laing. This is my personal website.

I’m an English-born New Zealander, currently living in my home town of Dunedin. I spend as much time as I can in Central Otago and would like to spend more in other regions of the South Island, which I firmly believe to be the most beautiful place on the planet.

I’m an aspiring Mathematician, currently studying towards a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Otago. The working title of my thesis is Differential Geometry with Applications to Biology and Bionics, which is a fancy way of saying that I study bubbles. I graduated from that same university in 2009 with an LLB and a BSc(Hons) in Mathematics.

As a Classical Liberal (or Libertarian), I’m an ardent supporter of free markets and limited government, and am currently the President of Otago University Students For Liberty. Among my other interests are guitar, ice hockey and single malt scotch whisky. I help to run SlapShot.net.nz, an ice hockey forum which I co-founded with Ryan Hellyer.

The site began as a playground for me to try out xhtml and css, then PHP and finally WordPress. After some time spent as a simple landing page, ChrisLaing.net has settled into comfortable old age as a personal blog.

St Bathans - Central Otago

Good blogs have an overarching theme or subject: thus, mine will not be a good blog, unless you consider “things of interest to Chris Laing” to be a worthy topic (as well you should!). I’ll probably avoid,”I had elephant eggs for breakfast today, and they were delicious”-type posts, instead focussing on items from the web which are of interest to me, political opinion (of which I am not in short supply) and topics related to my work (although if I do ever have elephant eggs for breakfast, I’ll be sure to let everyone know).