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. 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 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 tropical geometry, both purely for its own sake and for its applications 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.
My research is funded in part by the prestigious GAANN Fellowship sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, as of Spring Semester 2025.
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 taking a break from teaching during Spring Semester 2025 to focus on my multiple research projects.
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)