(1) For pseudonymous candidates, Are you a professional mathematician? In what capacity?

(Does not apply.)

(2) Assuming a notion of "culture" as explained here, what would a newly elected moderator do to preserve it? Will there be more efforts to preserve the culture, or more to steer it toward things nearer to "what a Stack Exchange forum should be?"

As a moderator, I would be conservative in the sense that I would oppose against possible tendencies to get too close to math.stackexchange.com or otherwise to weaken the site's standards, and in that I would actively seek to preserve the specific culture of MathOverflow.

In particular, I would seek to preserve the freedom to provide wordy comments, including such which just kindly say "Thank you!" for an answer. Further, I think the wide spectrum of styles in which questions and answers are written is a great plus of MathOverflow, which definitely should be kept. Also I am in favor of continuing to allow also smaller edits to improve the clarity or appearance of a question or an answer.

I think acception / rejection rates of questions should depend entirely on the quality of the questions asked, and it does not make sense to try to get close to a certain specific rate.

(3) What time zone are you in?

UTC +1 hour in winter and UTC +2 hours in summer -- I live in Germany.

(4) How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

One of the first things I would try is to kindly explain the situation to the user by e-mail. There is always a reasonable chance that a user is not aware of the impression his behavior makes on other people, and that this already solves the problem. If it does not, the appropriate way to proceed really depends on various things, like how valuable the answers are and how bad the situation with the arguments and flags is, and many more. In such situation I would discuss any possible action with my fellow moderators.

(5) How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Just let him know. There is always a chance that he closed / deleted the question by accident -- and if not, he may have valid reasons for doing so which I haven't seen. Of course there may always be cases of doubt, but given what I have seen so far on this site, the potential for conflicts here seems really minimalistic.

(6) In your opinion, what do moderators do?

I think the role of moderators is to impartially deal with any problems and misbehavior of users, and to keep the site on-topic as far as this is not done by the community anyway.

Also, moderators perform general maintenance work like cleaning up tags, removing blatantly off-topic posts etc. as well as administrative tasks like those related to this election.

Further, the moderators serve as contact persons for the user community, and as such they answer any technical questions related to the site and provide assistence in case of problems.

(7) A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?

This sign would remind me that I am not only speaking as myself, but also in a sense in the name of the community.

(8) In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

I think this is really a strange question -- being a moderator means taking a specific role, not being more or less "effective" than somebody else. I think the question is in some sense similar to asking somebody in what way joining the fire brigade would make him more effective.

(9) Do you think women are underrepresented in the MO community compared to the mathematical community as a whole? Is this a problem for MO? If so, what would you do about it as a moderator? See also: 1483 and 985

Yes, woman are obviously underrepresented on MO, compared to the mathematical community as a whole. This is an issue which I find a real pity. Also, I would really have liked to see a female candidate in this election.

One factor which I guess might make woman hesitate to participate is the design of this site, which very visibly attaches numerical reputation scores to people, and which is possibly perceived as pretty masculine by some.

What I could do to increase participation of woman on this site is, seen realistically, probably limited -- but in any case I would encourage more female participants to join, and would try to reduce concerns with respect to rude behavior towards new users etc..

(10) As MathOverflow is growing, the diversity of the moderator team might become an issue of interest. As I understand, the present moderators have much in common, and women are, to say it that way, underrepresented. In which way do you think would you contribute to the diversity of the moderator team?

I would be the first MathOverflow moderator based in Europe -- or one of the first, as not all candidates have revealed their locations so far.