Zihong Chen (Top)
Email: zihongch at mit dot edu
Office: MIT 2-340b
Welcome to my home page! I'm a fourth year graduate student at MIT, fortunate to be advised by Paul Seidel.
I will be on the job market this year.
I'm interested in symplectic topology, as well as its interaction with mirror symmetry and noncommutative geometry. My recent projects concern Fukaya categories and enumerative geometry in positive characteristics, and applying these techniques to questions in ordinary Gromov-Witten theory via reduction mod p methods.
Research
Quantum Steenrod operations and Fukaya categories, arXiv (2024).
On operadic open-closed maps in characteristic p, arXiv (2024).
Earlier undergraduate projects
Special Lagrangians in the Landau-Ginzburg mirror of CP^2, available here (2020). Senior thesis at Harvard College, mentored by Denis Auroux.
Stability conditions and exceptional objects in triangulated categories, Math. Res. Lett, Vol 27, No 4 (2020). Available here. REU project, mentored by Hiro Lee Tanaka.
Teaching
In Spring 2024, I served as course administrator and led recitation for 18.06 Linear Algebra.
In Fall 2023, I led recitation for 18.06 Linear Algebra.
In Spring 2023, I led recitation for 18.06 Linear Algebra.
In Spring 2022, I served as teaching assistant for 18.906 Algebraic Topology II.
Seminars
In Spring 2024, I co-organized a Reading seminar on crystalline cohomology and Gauss-Manin connections with Jae Hee Lee and Yonghwan Kim.
In Spring 2022, I co-organized a Reading seminar on Local to global principles in symplectic topology with Jae Hee Lee.
Talks
2024/06 MAGIC seminar, Imperial College London. "The exponential type conjecture and symplectic topology in characteristic p".
2024/04 Informal symplectic seminar, MIT. "Quantum Steenrod operations and Fukaya categories".
2023/12 Symplectic geometry and gauge theory seminar, Columbia University. "Cyclic open-closed maps and quantum Steenrod operations".