In this first post (in a planned series of 6), I want to revisit some of the topics of the semesters I spent as part of the Directed Reading Program (DRP) during my time at Penn. For those unfamiliar, a DRP pairs undergraduate students with graduate students to undergo a semester-long supervised study. These programs have a plethora of benefits for all parties involved:

• Undergraduates get to learn about math topics that are not covered in core mathematics classes and have a self-guided …

Lately, I have been reorganizing some of my past work scattered across many paper notebooks, computer folders, and OneNote. I wanted to create a minimalist, academic site to showcase some of my projects and general mathematical thoughts. At the same time, establishing an internet presence beyond a LinkedIn profile seemed to be a good investment for the modern era. This blog post details part of my journey into setting up this website. While this post may lack certain details, it is useful to …

I wanted to recap my sixth and final semester as part of UPenn’s Directed Reading Program. During the semester, the general goal was to learn about Mapping Class Groups, a nice tool from geometric topology. Similar to algebraic topology, mapping class groups involve assigning certain algebraic structures (groups) to topological spaces, generating an invariant of the space. A central theme of problems in topology is distinguishing topological spaces apart. In a point-set topology class, we …