Math
I grew up reading Martin Gardner’s columns as a child, and was heavily inspired by Dr. Sun, who runs 九章 (Chiuchang Mathematics Education Foundation). I also did a lot of math competitions in middle and high school. One of the weirder things that blossomed out of this was me presenting about Triangles of Absolute Differences at the Gathering 4 Gardener 9, which hilariously appeared as Problem 3 on the 2018 IMO because nobody on the jury realized it was a known result.
I was big on combinatorics and my favorite theorem is probably still Cayley’s formula for the number of trees. Some neat proofs other than the “standard” one with Prüfer codes:
- Joyal’s bijective proof;
- Pitman’s proof by double counting;
- A surprisingly elegant proof by generating functions.
I also dabbled in theoretical computer science a bunch. One of my earliest ventures into this space was in middle school where I submitted a paper on simple variations on the secretary problem, which won a silver medal for some reason. Fields I’ve surveyed in classes and summer projects include communication complexity, the prophet inequality, and tree reconstruction.
My first actual publication (simply in the sense that I am listed as a coauthor), done while at Zoom, is Rotatable Zero Knowledge Sets, ASIACRYPT 2022.