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. I’m broadly interested in discrete math and complexity theory. A list of papers I’ve coauthored can be found here. A couple topics I’m generally 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. Understanding average-case complexity is tricky, but also very fundamental, and it seems like people are doing a lot of really great work. The most related thing I’ve done is this paper with some connections to one-way permutations, but thinking about more.
• AI safety. Are there ideas from CS theory (e.g. cryptography or complexity theory) that can help mitigate potential dangers from AI? It’s not clear to what extent we should expect to get helpful theory, but I’m excited about trying.

Some things I like outside of math:

• Quizbowl. I ran our clubs back in high school and undergrad; currently I’m 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 — I have a couple of posts at various interpolation points between math exposition and narrative fiction on my blog.
• Puzzles. I puzzlehunt with the 17th Shard team! 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’m a big fan of long walks, including proper hiking, but also including things like “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 looking at a miscellany of old Nathan stuff, including some times in the past when I tried to record music. The quality wasn’t high enough for me to put them on this page directly, but maybe if you put a certain word into a certain textbox that could change…