I have formally mentored students at all levels (graduate, undergraduate, high school).
Current projects
Fall 2022 – Yash Agarwal, Ethan Lam, Akira Takaki – Research through Recreational Mathematics
The four of us worked our way through the books Nonplussed? and Impossible! by Havil. Then we discussed select articles from the Journal of Recreational Mathematics (which the U of T conveniently has a complete collection of!)
Past projects
The following are reading courses (either formal or informal) that I have lead with students while I was at UTM.
- Summer 2022 Katya Golubeva Undergraduate at UTM
- Winter 2022 Iwan Irawan Undergraduate at UTM – Reading Course
- Fall 2021 Michael O’Brien Undergraduate at UTM – Reading Course
- Winter 2020 Matthew Cartier Undergraduate at UTSG – Reading Course
- Winter 2020 Nikki Sigurdson Undergraduate at UTM – Reading Course
Sept 2017-Dec 2018. Davoud Abdi, PhD student at the University of Calgary
Davoud and I worked on a project in infinite graph theory about end-devouring rays, as in this 2017 paper “Infinite end-devouring sets of rays with prescribed start vertices” by J. Pascal Gollin, Karl Heuer.
Summer 2018. Lyra Qian, Undergraduate student at the University of Calgary
Lyra held a PURE award that summer. She looked at a problem in graph theory related to the (difficult) question: Do tournaments have the Hrushovski property? Our first goal was to produce code that produces the Hrushovski witness for graphs.
Lyra attended the CUMC in Saskatoon and the Diversity in Mathematics: Undergraduate Summer school. Here’s Lyra at the Diversity in Math workshop:
Feb 2018-Summer 2018. Jordyn Dyck, Undergraduate student at the University of Calgary
We are looking at the common techniques for solving recurrence relations. “What do these techniques have in common?”, “Are they really the same?”, “What advantages do certain techniques have?”
Here’s a taste of the project, written by someone else.
Dec 2017-May 2018. Nuiok Dicaire, Master’s student at the University of Calgary
We are learning about Quantum Ramsey Theory as presented in these two recent papers:
- A “quantum” Ramsey theorem for operator systems by Nik Weaver. 2016.
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An infinite quantum Ramsey theorem by Matthew Kennedy, Taras Kolomatski, Daniel Spivak. 2017.
Summer 2017. Lyra Qian, Undergraduate student at the University of Calgary
Lyra and I went through the first chapter of Wilf’s “Generating Functionology”, which lays out the basics of generating functions and their uses.
Lyra filled in all of the details of this chapter and presented it in a way that’s accessible to a first-year student who has only taken Calculus 2.
Here’s a link to the write-up.
2010-2014. Math mentorship program at the University of Toronto
Each year I worked with 2-4 high school students on various mathematical projects. We met once a week for a semester.
- 2014 – Crowdsourcing hard problems
- 2012 – Small Sum Sets and Product sets of positive integers
- 2011 – Contest math and field theory
- 2010 (Summer) – Mini-course on Lebesgue measure
- 2010 – Characterizing groups of small finite order
Mike Pawliuk - Mathematics 