About me
My general aptitude:
I have a variety of interests, ranging from mathematics to history of religions to comedy. Even in mathematics I'm constantly fascinated by its many principles. I would say that although my mathematical adventures appear to be more diverse than those of many other juniors, they do form well-defined clusters.
I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge; since childhood I've carried a desire to be well-rounded in order to understand the meaning of life. I have the ability to adapt, and that is reflected in my being a diverse mathematician. I value meaning; I value work; I'm career-oriented, and I'm a self-proclaimed workaholic.
My personal powers:
I have the ability to speed-read. Once, I read and analyzed a paper on the convergence of graph Laplacians in two days, despite not knowing what those objects were. Another time, I read a paper on stable phase retrieval in one day. However, my fastest personal record was reading an entire book on Sampling Theory in one day. Of course, with that speed, I was solely looking for the main ideas, and it helped that I already had some basic knowledge of the theory. I also trained myself on the topic of High Dimensional Probability within two months.
I (like to believe that I) am creative. When learning Optimal Transport, I had a vision that it'd be applicable to the field of Transfer Learning. Years later, I found out it was indeed the case: Optimal Transport for Domain Adaptation is a principle.
A past adventure:
I have had many mathematical adventures. For example, one of the questions I posed to myself back then was:
"Given an instantiation of an SBM G=(V,E). What statistical test can be used to distinguish if G is a 2-community SBM or a 1-community SBM?"
This problem is super-hard if G is very sparse, say, (|E|/|V|) = o(\log |V|). Of course, without the right background, I failed spectacularly. This is my humblest failure experience.
An arbitrary personal fact about me:
Though I hold a US passport, I consider myself a global citizen. I've been to 3 continents so far, lived in 4 countries and visited 4 more. I'm a fan of Ethiopian cuisine and of Tartar and gypsy folk music. In addition, I'm fascinated by anything South American.