Kaelyn S. Willingham

About Me:

• I am a 4th-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 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 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:

  • • Algebraic Statistics 2025 on March 25, 2025 (Poster Title: "Tropical Representations of Transformer Neural Networks")

    • Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry: Highlighting Underrepresented Genders on April 1, 2025 (Lightning Talk Title: "On the Pierce-Birkhoff Conjecture")

    • Graduate Student Topology & Geometry Conference 2025 on April 12, 2025 (Talk Title: "Spectral Properties of the Algebraic Path Problem")

    • UMN SIAM Seminar on Mathematics, its Applications and Computations on April 14, 2025 (Talk Title: "Probabilistic Chip-firing for Infectious Disease Modeling") 

2025 Travel Plans:

• January 8-11, 2025: 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) at the Seattle Convention Center (Seattle, WA)

• March 24-28, 2025: Algebraic Statistics 2025 at Technische Universität München (Munich, Germany)

• March 31 - April 4, 2025: Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry: Highlighting Underrepresented Genders at Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt, Germany)

• April 11-13, 2025: Graduate Student Topology & Geometry Conference 2025 at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)

• April 19-20, 2025: Meetings in Applied Algebraic Geometry 2025 at Auburn University (Auburn, AL)

• April 21-25, 2025: Research Visit with Prof. Josephine Yu at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA)

• May 27-31, 2025: Summer School on Topological Methods in Combinatorics at Iowa State University (Ames, IA) 

• June - July, 2025: Research Visit with Prof. Florian Frick at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA)

• July 7-11, 2025: SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry 2025 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, WI)