Sam Zhang

Sam Zhang's Homepage

my email is shimian dot my last name at gmail.com

I am a PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My advisor is Aaron Clauset.

I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Psychology from Swarthmore College in 2014. I was a 2014 University of Chicago Data Science for Social Good Fellow. Then I worked as a software engineer at companies such as OpenCounter and Pivotal Labs.

My hobbies include making interactive mathematical toys (see thumbnails or blog posts below) and taking my long dog on adventures, and as of late, biking.

Pronouns: he/him.

Updates
- (January, 2021) I have successfully completed my PhD program's preliminary exam requirements (in probability/statistics, analysis, and numerics).
- (August, 2020) I volunteered as a Lead Project Scoper for the 2020 Solve for Good Summer. I scoped several projects, like this UNICEF project on air pollution and COVID.
- (July, 2020) I presented recent work on scientific productivity at IC2S2.
- (May, 2020) New preprint: Jointly modeling prevalence, sensitivity and specificity for optimal sample allocation.
- (April, 2020) New (first!) preprint. I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
- (March, 2020) I gave the March 3rd topology seminar talk on discrete Morse theory. Slides.
Blog posts
- (October, 2020) Curve shortening
- (January, 2020) A catastrophe machine
- (June, 2019) Linear regression, the old fashioned way
- (February, 2019) A moduli space for triangles
- (January, 2019) The cross-section of a cylinder is an ellipse
- (January, 2019) Whitney's Umbrella
- (January, 2019) Voronoizer bookmarklet
- (January, 2019) Voronoize this page!
- (January, 2019) Treasure hunting
- (December, 2018) An ascii implicit function plotter
- (December, 2018) Hypocycloids
- (December, 2018) Cats on ladders
- (December, 2018) A network look at integer sequences
- (October, 2018) A visualization of a geometric bound on convex hulls
- (January, 2018) Building a municipal land use code search engine using a graph of word embeddings