This is Mingcong Zeng's homepage. Written in Chinese, my name is 曾鸣聪。
You can email me at mingcongzeng@gmail.com.

I work for Voleon as a researcher in London.
I was a mathematician working in algebraic topology.
If you are interested in my transition to the industry, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Interests

I worked with Gergely and Honglu on applying reinforcement learning to algebraic geometry (see Projects).

I worked in algebraic topology, specializing in chromatic and equivariant stable homotopy theory. My research focused on technical computations  (usually via spectral sequences), and the unexpected consequences and relations revealed by these computations.
Chromatic means you smash the object you are interested in into (colorful) pieces, study them, and then try your best to reassemble the pieces together.
Equivariant means you keep spinning the globe in your living room, and after an hour you realize that no matter how hard you spin it, the shape of the globe is more or less the same by looking at it from different angles.

Projects

Hironaka Game (with Gergely Bérczi and Honglu Fan). GitHub

Applying reinforcement learning (DQN and AlphaZero) to the Hironaka polyhedra game. The game gives a resolution of a singularity in a high-dimensional space.

Research

      Accepted/Published papers:

1. An ML Approach to Resolution of Singularities. (joint with Bérczi and Fan)
   Proceedings of ICML-TAG 2023.

2. The localized slice spectral sequence, norms of Real bordism, and the Segal conjecture. (joint with Meier and Shi)
   Advances in Mathematics, Volume 412, 1 January 2023, 108804. DOI.

3. Models of Lubin-Tate spectra via Real bordism theory. (joint with Beaudry, Hill, and Shi)
   Advances in Mathematics, Volume 392, 2021, 108020. DOI.

4. Quotient rings of HF_2 smash HF_2. (joint with Beaudry, Hill, Lawson, and Shi)
   Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 374 (2021), no. 12, 8949–8988.

5. Transchromatic extensions in motivic bordism. (joint with Beaudry, Hill, and Shi)
   Accepted by Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.

6. The Z-Homotopy Fixed Points of C_n Spectra with Applications to Norms of MUR. (joint with Michael Hill)
   New York J. Math. 26 (2020) 92–115 

      Submitted papers & preprints:

1. Transchromatic phenomena in the equivariant slice spectral sequence. (joint with Meier and Shi)
   Preprint.

2. A stratification of the equivariant slice filtration. (joint with Meier and Shi)
   Preprint.

3. On the slice spectral sequence for quotients of norms of Real bordism. (joint with Beaudry, Hill, Lawson, and Shi)
   Submitted.

4. Equivariant Eilenberg-Mac Lane spectra in cyclic p-groups.
   Preprint. 

Activities

In Spring 2021, I taught a hybrid seminar/course on the Hill-Hopkins-Ravenel solution of the Kervaire invariant one problem.

In Spring 2020, Hana Jia Kong and I organized an online reading seminar on THH.

In Spring 2020, Gijs Heuts, Yuqing Shi, and I organized a masterclass on exotic spheres.

About Me

• I am a member of research staff in Voleon. I am based at London.

• I was a postdoc at Aarhus University in Denmark, supervised by Gergely Bérczi. 

• I was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany from September 2021 to August 2023, supervised by Tobias Barthel.

• I was a postdoc at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands from January 2019 to August 2021. My mentor was Lennart Meier. 

• I was in the Isaac Newton Institute for the Homotopy Harnessing Higher Structures program from August 2018 to December 2018. 

• I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester under Doug Ravenel and defended my thesis in May 2018.

• I was an undergraduate student at Zhejiang University under the guidance of Shiu-Chun Wong.

• I travel, read books, and play video games when I have time or need distractions.

• I am a fan of García Márquez, Hidetaka Miyazaki, and Hideo Kojima.