Hi, I’m Nathan, a first-year PhD student in the Theory of Computation group at MIT, advised by the inimitable Ryan Williams. I did my undergrad at MIT as well. A list of papers I’ve coauthored can be found here. A few topics I’m interested in at the moment:

• Space-bounded complexity. Here’s one paper I’ve written in this area, trying to understand the weirdness of catalytic computing in a more information-theoretic setting, and here’s another about the differences between computing something “in-place” versus computing it into a dedicated write-only output.
• Average-case complexity and crypto foundations. The most related thing I’ve done is this paper with some connections to one-way permutations, but thinking about more.
• AI safety. It’s not clear to what extent we should expect to get useful ideas from CS theory, but I’m excited about trying.

Some things I like outside of math include:

• Quizbowl. I ran our clubs back in high school and undergrad; currently I’m not very involved but still enjoy academic trivia in moderate doses.
• Fiction and poetry. I enjoy reading all sorts of literature, maybe especially if it’s from the 20th century and slightly weird. I also try to do a little creative writing sometimes — for a couple interpolation points between math exposition and narrative fiction, see my blog.
• Puzzles. I hunt with 17th Shard! I especially like puzzles involving cryptics or wordplay.
• Zumba. My ratio of “enthusiasm about dancing” to “dance ability” is extremely high. It makes me very happy to listen to loud music and jump around — I call this activity “zumba”, although maybe in standard usage “zumba” just refers to a special case of this? Unclear.
• Walking. I like long walks, including proper hiking, but also including, e.g., “walk by the side of the road for 40 miles”. If you’re interested in joining such an activity, let me know and I’d be super down.

If you made it through this whole list, it’s possible you’d also be interested in a miscellany of old Nathan things. The quality isn’t high enough for me to put it all on this page directly, but maybe if you put a certain word into a certain textbox that could change…