Webpage of a math cat.
I graduated! It’s been a long time coming. Those who have been here before might have concluded I was due to graduate in 2021, or 2022 at the latest. As I began writing my thesis, my timeline was interrupted: first by bereavement, then by medical leave, and later by caregiving. I am so, so relieved (and proud!) to announce I have finally finished, graduating with cum laude distinction (the highest…
My first college major was neuroscience. I learned about the beauty of mathematics by chance conversations, and eventually decided I deserved to give myself a chance to explore it. When I decided to switch my major to Honours Mathematics, I felt behind my peers who chose math as their major because they had been good at it growing up. After three years in graduate school, I have made my own…
A new talk is available for viewing. I gave a version of this talk today at UIC, and this recording was the practice. The content is motivated by growing pains I was having while writing my thesis, which I will elaborate a bit below. In this talk, I’ve focused on explaining the research problem I’ve been trying to tackle in my PhD at the best of my abilities. Oftentimes when I go to seminars or…
My second paper has been uploaded on arXiv . It is titled “Regular left-orders on groups” and is joint with Yago Antolín and Cristóbal Rivas . In case of interest, I have given talk back in November at Queen’s University on some of the results. A version of the talk is available on YouTube .
I am on the lookout for a job in either academia or industry. I have uploaded my academic research statement in the “About” section in case of interest. Currently, I am in the thesis-writing stage of my PhD and would be looking for something starting in the Fall or Winter. I am open to working on problems outside of the scope of the research statement, especially in an industry context. I think…
The broken math should have been fixed. Recently, I have upgraded the website from using MathJax 2 to MathJax 3. In the process, I have accidentally broken some math environments, causing some lines of maths to disappear for some months. This seems to have affected mostly the more mathematics-heavy posts (which are incidentally in the favourite category of posts - whoops). I think it should be…
Two new seminar recordings are up on YouTube. The first one is an introductory talk on left-orderable groups, with some motivation on why it can be interesting to study left-orders under the lens of formal languages and a quick survey of my research niche. You can download the slides for the above talk here . The second is more advanced and is about my upcoming paper joint with my supervisor Y.…
I still deal with math anxiety regularly as a math PhD student. Here’s my advice on overcoming it. Step 1 Take a deep breath. Stop staring at those symbols for a bit. Make yourself tea. Step 2 When you come back to it, ask yourself: what is the thing you want to understand? If writing notes, I like to write it down at the top of the page so I don’t get sidetracked by feelings of inadequacy or…
I posted my one-hour seminar on YouTube. Here’s why I thought it was important for me to do so, and how you can make your own using iMovie. Update from 2026 : These days I just use screen capture and speak into noise cancelling headphones. The mouse allows me to point at the things I want to speak about. I record about a section of the talk at a time to allow me to practice several times and…
It’s been a while. Lots has happened since I started graduate school which I may or may not elaborate on at some point . Anyhow, lately I’ve been thinking about how to be useful to others via this blog again, while not overloading myself with the pressure to produce new content specifically for this blog. As a step into this direction, I’ve created a new section for this website where I post my…