Kaelyn S. Willingham
PhD Candidate, Mathematics, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Email address: will4247@umn.edu
About Me:
I am a 4th-year PhD Candidate in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. I have many advisors, but my primary co-advisors are Jeff Calder and Gregg Musiker.
I am also a Research Assistant in the Carlson School of Management at UMN, working alongside Russell Funk.
Before coming to UMN, I completed my BA in Mathematics at The Ohio State University under the tutelage of Profs. Jim Fowler, Matthew Kahle, & Crichton Ogle.
My research interests are vast and interdisciplinary. These days however, I think most about problems within the areas of applied geometry, applied topology, and applied combinatorics. (In particular, I'm thinking a lot about tropical geometry, both purely for its own sake and for its applications to machine learning & optimization theory.)
I am a native of Cincinnati, Ohio and a proud graduate of Walnut Hills High School ("Sursum ad Summum!").
In The News:
I completed my Preliminary Oral Examination on August 21, 2024 and advanced to PhD Candidacy.
I will be a lead instructor for the MATH 1271 ("CLA Calculus 1") course during Fall Semester 2024 at UMN.
For the 2024-2025 academic year, I will serve as Vice-President of the UMN chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
I will be speaking at the following upcoming events:
MAA NCS Fall 2024 Sectional Meeting on October 26, 2024 (Talk Title: "Tropical Geometry and the Algebraic Path Problem")
2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) on January 8, 2025 (Talk Title: "Spectral Properties of the Algebraic Path Problem")
2024 Travel Plans:
March 15-17, 2024: 2024 Graduate Student Combinatorics Conference (GSCC) at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA)
March 23-24, 2024: Mid-Atlantic Topology Conference 2024 at Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
April 10-12, 2024: 5th Graduate Student Meeting in Applied Algebra & Combinatorics at Freie Universität Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
May 20-21, 2024: Midwest Machine Learning Symposium (MMLS) 2024 at University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
June 6-7, 2024: Career Paths in the Mathematical Sciences at the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (Chicago, IL)
August 5-9, 2024: Young Topologists Meeting 2024 at Universität Münster (Münster, Germany)
October 25-26, 2024: MAA NCS Fall 2024 Sectional Meeting at Augustana University (Sioux Falls, SD)