Presentations
I’ve run a couple of special interest groups (SIGs) at my university through our ACM chapter. In Fall 2025 I ran SIG Math, an anthological set of presentations about different topics at the intersection of computer science and math. PDFs of the presentation slides are listed here.
I’ll be running SIG AI Safety in Fall 2026 so check back for more info soon!
SIG Math
Not as much about a math or CS topic specifically but instead about AI safety! I feel very strongly about this topic and wanted to encourage the regulars of the club to consider it. I also added some other examples of ways to do good that didn't involve AI specifically.
This presentation is much shorter and was instead accompanied by a live coding demonstration. I tried to focus on more of the mathematical features of Haskell, such as type classes and monads, in order to give listeners a broader taste of what the language has to offer.
I come from a pure math background, so this topic is great for me. A lot of my audience is actually more math-focused than computer science-focused, but this is an example of how a pure mathematician could use computer science.
a brief introduction to Cellular Automata. This topic isn't as unique as some of the other ones, but I think it's still a good example of the intersection between math and computer science.
This was my favorite presentation idea. I definitely spent the longest time working on this. This idea is pretty unique and also not super practical, but it appeals to me a lot since I have a background in pure math. I will say the actual presentation did not go that well. The presentation itself was very long, almost an hour and a half, even after I cut a lot of stuff. I think the content was a little bit too advanced for someone to get it all in one go. I wish I could do this again, but a little bit better. Maybe it would be nice as a YouTube video format or something.
A case study of something I did at work where I tried to optimize a matrix transpose to be as fast as possible. This is definitely the most programming-heavy of all the presentations, it even discusses SIMD. I think it's a good exploration of what performance-oriented programming looks like in practice.
This was my second favorite presentation. I think the math behind this is super cool, even if it becomes very theoretical. However, the beginning is also very practical because my school doesn't really teach functional programming concepts, and being able to think about sum types and product types is very important in my view.
This presentation goes over the algorithm behind JPEG compression. This one was shorter, but I think it still went pretty well. I also got to introduce the concept of Fourier transforms, and it's pretty practical -- people use JPEGs all the time!
This presentation introduces the concept of Tropical Algebra and applies it to programming fields like path finding. I don't think this topic has that much direct application, but the general philosophy of thinking of problems in different ways is useful. Also, I think I got lucky by making this presentation because Tropical Algebra actually was mentioned in several of the future presentations!
This presentation goes over how computers approximate sine and cosine programmatically and how you could derive it yourself. This presentation topic is actually what inspired me to start the club. I think it was well explained and gives a lot of insights for both programming and math.