Kaelyn S. Willingham

About Me:

• I am a 6th-year PhD Candidate in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. My primary co-advisors are Profs. Jeff Calder and Gregg Musiker.

• I am also a Research Assistant in the Carlson School of Management at UMN, working alongside Prof. Russell Funk.

• I completed my B.A. in Mathematics at The Ohio State University, where I pursued research projects under the advisory 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. My thesis research focuses on applications of toric geometry & tropical geometry to machine learning & optimization theory. On the side, I also spend some time working on problems in both applied sheaf theory and topological data analysis.

• ***I AM CURRENTLY ON THE JOB MARKET, AS OF THE 2026-2027 ACADEMIC YEAR.***

• I am a native of Cincinnati, Ohio and a proud graduate of Walnut Hills High School ("Sursum ad Summum!"). 

In The News:

• During Fall Semester 2026, I will serve as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for MATH 1272 ("Calculus II")  under lecturer Geoffrey Bentsen.

• For the 2026-2027 academic year, I will serve as President of the UMN chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

2026 Travel Plans:

• January 4-7, 2026: 2026 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) at the Washington Convention Center (Washington, DC)

• March 2, 2026: MSCS Department Colloquium at St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN)

• March 12-13, 2026: Research Visit with Prof. Heather Harrington's group at MPI-CBG (Dresden, Germany)

• March 16-20, 2026: Workshop on Polyhedral Geometry for Neural Networks at the University of Technology Nuremberg (Nuremberg, Germany)

• March 23-25, 2026: Workshop on Real Applied Algebra at the University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen, Denmark)

• April 24-26, 2026: GSTGC 2026 at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ)

• July 6-10, 2026: 2026 SIAM Annual Meeting at the Huntington Convention Center (Cleveland, OH)

• July 24-29, 2026: International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2026 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center (Philadelphia, PA)