What I'm doing Now

Last updated 06 February 2025

This is a now page. It is a written version of what I might say if we met in person and you asked me what I'm up to. The date at the top is important: it helps the reader determine if this is a now page or a then page.

Big News

Last year, my wife and I had a daughter. She's adorable and perfect, although she tends to leak a little.

Research Travel and News

I'm typically in either Boston or Providence.

I have more limited travel plans than normal.

• I applied for the NSF AIMing grant. I'm happy to talk about it or share my application materials.
• I applied for the AI for Math fund from Renaissance Philanthropy. (They were apparently swarmed by applications and they've told me they're running several weeks behind against their intended schedule).
• I'll be in Washington DC during the week March 3-7.
• On April 22nd, I'll be giving a colloqium at Swarthmore.
• On April 23rd (approximately), I'll be giving a talk at the Philadelphia area number theory seminar.
• I will be in France in May. Many details remain to be ironed out.

Recent Travel and News

2025 happenings

• I gave a lightning talk at the Brown University Algebra seminar on February 3rd, too.
• I was in New York City January 15-18 for the annual meeting of the Simons collaboration. I gave a (different) lightning talk there.
• At the Joint Math Meetings in 2025, I coorganized a Special Session on Mathematics Informed by Computing.

2024 happenings

• On November 19th, I gave a seminar at LSU.
• During the week of November 11th to the 15th, I'll be at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics workshop on murmurations.
• In October, I spent a couple of weeks at Harvard's machine learning and math program (especially the number theory weeks).
• On April 22nd, I'm giving a talk at the Brown Algebra seminar.
• During the week of April 8th, I was in NYC. But not on April 8th, as I was actually in Vermont looking for totality in an eclipse. And it was awesome.
• During the week of April 1st, I was in Scotland.
• I was at Lean for the Curious Mathematician at CIRM.
• I co-organized of the session Arithmetic Geometry with a View towards Computation, at the Joint Math Meetings.
• During the week of January 8th, I was in NYC attending a conference on computational number theory at the Simons Foundation.

2023 happenings

• I am a co-organizer of a workshop that will be held at AIM from 4 December to 8 December, 2023: Open-source cyberinfrastructure supporting mathematics research. Our registration is filled up, but if you are interested in the broader problems, let me know. I'm sure there is lots to do.
• I was at Maine-Quebec (again) this year. It was wonderful seeing so many familiar faces.
• I was at Lucant from July 10th to July 14th, and at the Murmurations hot topic event the week before.
• I returned to Marseilles, France in early May.
• I was at AIM (in San Jose) in early March.
• I was in Marseilles, France from late February to early March.

2022 happenings

• I was at Maine-Quebec on October 15-16.
• I was at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics roughly from 24 October to 18 November. This is at Stony Brook, NY.
• I was at the LMFDB Modular Curves Workshop, even though it is in the middle of my stay at Stony Brook.
• I was at the Joint Math Meetings in Boston from 4 January to 7 January. I am not presenting this year.
• I was in New York City during the week of January 9th to January 13th. This includes attending the annual meeting of the Simons Foundation.

Research

I'm currently actively working on several projects.

• (With several people at the Math and Machine Learning program at Harvard's CMSA) I'm working on several projects studying number theoretic data with machine learning. I anticipate having at least two preprints available by December.
• The LMFDB now has rigorous Maass form data that I computed. But it wants more, and I want to improve the current data. And I need to fully describe how it was all done. AND I'm trying to finish up a more general, explicit trace formula to compute more. That is, I'm doing so many things related to Maass forms.
• I'm working with Jeff Hoffstein and Bertrand Cambou on a project concerning biometric cryptography. Our idea was a finalist for the Innovation of the Year award at Innovation@Brown!
• Check out code4math, a new community for mathematicians, programmers, and enthusiasts. We have a zulip chat! I'll talk more about this elsewhere.

Speculatively, I've been working on a couple of problems in enumerative geometry.

Teaching

I'm not currently teaching. But I am developing a course sequence on AI and math, and in particular on using machine learning to help produce rigorous mathematics (a la AlphaGeometry). I'm very happy to talk more about this.

Fun

• This last year, I grew an apartment porch garden. I grew tomatos, carrots, basil, spring onions, a couple varieties of lettuce, chives, parsley, and dill. There were also marigolds, white impatiens, and citronella. This was very easy and very successful. I've been eating hundreds of tomatos and having porch BLTs. I would highly recommend.
• I've been biking a lot. I'm using a site called Wandrer to track individual streets that I bike, and I'm on a quest to bike (or run/walk) every street (scope to be determined later). So far, I've completed a bit over 15 percent of the streets in Suffolk County, which includes Boston. And I've completed all of my local area of Boston.
• I make my own soda. Think soda jerk. What this means is that I make syrups (typically fruity, less sweet than store bought soda) and have a CO2 tank that I use to carbonate water (typically at a bit more than typical carbonation). Our current favorites are grapefruit soda and rhubarb soda.