I am a mathematician and programmer, working in some intersection or another or these two fields. Presently, I'm working on quantum compilation at IBM Research; previously, I've worked on active learning as an OpenAI Fellow, compilation at Rigetti Computing and on homotopy theory in academia, especially the connections between algebraic topology and algebraic geometry known as "chromatic homotopy theory". In addition to "traditional" research, I am very interested in communication within scientific circles. In particular, I spent a lot of time as an academic coaxing my topologist peers to speak the language of number theory.
My brief tour in academia consisted of a Benjamin Peirce fellowship in the Harvard math department, graduate work at Berkeley under Constantin Teleman, and undergraduate studies in computer science at Urbana-Champaign under Matt Ando and Elsa Gunter.
You might also be interested in my wife's website, ThisIsSam. Also, this URL used to host a group research blog, Chromotopy.
My mathematical interests are in using algebro-geometric tools to answer questions in algebraic topology, and I have a penchant for computations—but I've done some other things too.
I passed my qualifying exam on November 23rd, 2011. Here are my qual syllabus and transcript of the exam questions I could remember.
Here is an unedited copy of my PhD thesis. Beware: this document contains several significant errors. Readers should consult the published version for the original research and the book project for the exposition. A long time ago, I wrote an undergraduate thesis under Elsa Gunter, where we explored a modification of ambient process calculi. Unfortunately, the main technical result remains unfinished.
I'm not very active, but I have also written some things on MathOverflow.
Also, here are two animations of the stabilization of the unstable Adams spectral sequence for the sphere, at the prime 2 and at the prime 3, due to Barnes, Poduska, and Shick.
I've given a good number of talks, and I was often funded through a teaching position. Students and onlookers can find both talk notes and course pages below.
dTQEC: | |
quilc: | |
Atlas: | |
Ext Chart: | |
Op[]: | |
Coact: | |
A-cocycles: | |
A-visual: | |
M-cocycles: | |
Persistent Sullivan models: | |
Swift-Agenda: | |
Agenda: | |
Smithy: | |
MW2: |
This is a work in progress.