Kaelyn S. Willingham

About Me:

• I am a 5th-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:

• Courtesy of the GAANN Fellowship, I will be taking a break from teaching for Spring Semester 2026 to focus on research.

• For the 2025-2026 academic year, I will serve as President of the UMN chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

• I will be speaking at the following upcoming events:

  • • Math Department Colloquium @ St. Olaf College on March 2, 2026 (Talk Title: "Geometry in a Tropical Climate!")

    • Math Department Colloquium @ Augustana University on March 30, 2026 (Virtual Talk Title: "Geometry in a Tropical Climate!")

    • GSTGC 2026 on Date TBD (Talk Title: "Sheaves and Matroids for Network Science")

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 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)