About

I am a student at Stanford University, expected graduation 2021.

I don’t think what follows is of too much practical value, but if it’s credentials you base your first impression on me on, I might as well spew them out.

In high school, I:

  • Was awarded Second Place Grand Award in Mathematics Category at Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2017
    • Project was a conjecture and proof of new upper bounds on the metric dimension for planar graphs with applications to GPS-less navigation systems
  • Scored 14 on the 2017 United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (ranking me around top ~110 nationwide)
  • Co-authored of a paper in combinatorial graph theory on the Metric Dimension for Planar Graphs, readable here: [1704.04066] Bounds on metric dimension for families of planar graphs
  • Achieved Distinguished Honor Roll Recipient on both AMC 12 and AMC 10 (top 1% on the nation’s largest math competition)
  • Was ranked top 30 in the national American Invitational Mathematics Examination (the invitation round after the AMC), an invitation-only round for the US Math Team selection process
  • Attended Ross Mathematics Camp at Ohio State University 2018 (one of USA’s oldest pure math summer program and an intense 6-week study of number theory)
  • Started school’s only math club, growing the club in three years to having twenty regular members, lecturing on a weekly basis on a topic of interest, hosting contests and activities, and promoting math at school assemblies
  • Started a collaborative blog  for competitive math students training for Olympiads and became one of the most popular blogs on AoPS, one of the followers of which was my ISEF partner, and a few more of which became my best friends

In college, I have:

  • Been selected in the two dozen cohort among hundreds of entrepreneurial-inclined Stanford students to be in this year’s Pear Garage program
  • Published two end-to-end iOS apps on the App Store
  • Started Quizkly with a partner, a machine learning EdTech product being user tested by Stanford Medical Students

Coursework-wise, I have taken:

  • The 60DM honor math sequence for freshmen, topics covering
    • 61DM by Jacob Fox – linear algebra (matrices, rank-nullity, invertibility, decomposition, determinants, eigenvalues/vectors, etc.), encoding algorithms, applications to combinatorics and graph theory (expander graphs, coloring, closed walks bounds, cliques)
    • 62DM by Kannan Soundararajan – structures of groups, rings, domains, primes and postulates (with some analysis proofs), PIDs/UFDs, finite fields, finite field applications, and more finite fields, and a cool cryptography application (AKS primality)
    • 63DM by Tadashi Tokieda – probability theory, probability/moment generating functions, Bayesian methods, concentration bounds, law of large numbers, Boltzmann distributions, branching/poisson/random processes, Markov chains
  • Programming Abstractions Accelerated (CS106X) by Jerry Cain
    • C++ – pointers, dynamic memory allocation, templates, classes
    • Recursion – memoization, caching
    • Data structure implementations – maps, sets, trees, queues, stacks, binary search trees, heaps
    • Some algorithms
  • Machine Learning (CS229) by Christopher Re and Tengyu Ma
    • Infamous Stanford course: very mathematical coverage of machine learning – syllabus widely available online, like here
  • Others
    • Theory of Probability (STATS116), Introduction to R (CME195), Science of Information, Rhetoric of Education, Preventing Human Extinction, Free Will and Responsibility, Entrepreneurial Seminar

I’ve also attended:

  • Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition 2018 – a highly selective program, took classes in cognitive science, psychology and artificial intelligence under famous academics
  • Make School Summer Academy 2018 – completed curriculum in iOS App Dev using Swift 4 and Xcode, took courses in need-finding, web dev, continuous deployment, APIs, and much more
  • AwesomeMath Summer Program twice – an Olympiad-prep math camp

I am a declared Mathematical and Computational Science major. Since I’m very inherently and purpose driven, I know myself well enough to know my motivation comes much more naturally when I’m pursuing passion projects then taking the same set of courses 40% (# Stanford CS majors, 2018) of other undergrads on campus take. I hope my former internationally ranked mathematical background and my increasing collection of side projects can demonstrate the technical ability and drive to handle software internships.

If you would like to read a short autobiography on myself, see here (soon to come).