About myself
A Rough Biography
A Rough Biography
- My name is Xin Tong. The middle name "Thomson" is used to distinguish me from my "brother", who shares the same name was also a Ph.D. from Princeton, ORFE. Currently, I am an assistant professor of Mathematics at the National University of Singapore.
- I was born in an artistic family. My father is a professor in industrial designs. I was brought up as a future artist till the age of 10. I learnt how to paint and really like sketching things I see. These early stage training does have an impact over my current work in applied math. I enjoy observing various phenomenon rise in different problems and creating novel frameworks to attack problems. The only difference is that I use math instead of brush to do my work.
- So what happened when I was 10? I switched my interest to math, olympiad math, in particular. I liked solving equations and the deriving results through pure logic. And, I LOVEd the feeling of being smart. I have been trained as an olympiad math student for another 10 years. I managed to be the 2nd place of 10-th graders in the 30-th Russian Math Olympiad, (I beat all other Russians!) but sadly I did not manage to get into IMO. Looking back, I am really thankful for these early years training, whereby my technical capability is well honed. On the other hand, I also became too technicality, challenge and honor driven, which was not very healthy for my development.
- Peking university and studying in math were both what I dreamt of, and I got them both for my undergrad. The math school at Peking University is a great place for bring up pure mathematicians. The hot topic of my year was algebraic topology, as it was seen as the "math of 20th century". However, I did not really enjoy it. In fact, I started to realize that I did not like abstract problems at all. I enjoyed probability theory and dynamical systems, as they talk about concrete things that evolve in time, and I can easily picture them in my mind. It was the first time that I break from what are seen as the "hot topics", and pursue things that I interest myself.
- I was so lucky to become a grad student of Ramon . He is extremely strong in probability, and he also likes work on problems with concrete significance. He works very hard and keeps a rigorous attitude towards every little things in his results. By working with him, I started to realize my shortcomings and things that I need to catch up. On the other hand, ORFE at Princeton is a very interesting place, where you can meet people working in statistics, optimization, operations research and financial math. I was amazed by how many things you can apply math on, and also start getting interested problems involving data.
- I was very lucky again to be able to work with Andy. He has shown me many interesting application of math on turbulence, data assimilation, atmospheric and oceanic problems. He has also shown me this interesting perspective of applied math, from where you try to interpret scientific questions mathematically. Although there was an uneasy transition in the beginning, I feel myself renewed after two years collaboration with Andy. On the other hand, Courant institute is an amazing place for applied mathematicians. There are many world famous people around, and attending probability, dynamical system and AOS seminars really have expanded by horizon. Moreover, there are so many promising young people here, like Nan and David, who are also pursing applied math at the same time.
- I am very lucky again. I joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2016 with my wife Wanjie Wang. She in the statistic department, working on high dimensional statistics. Our story at NUS has just begun, so come back and check for more.