What I'm up to now
This is a now page. It’s my public answer to “what have you been up to lately”? Last updated 9 February 2026.
Coordinates
I’m a bit nomadic now, but starting from August 2025, I will officially be based in Durham, near Duke.
Things I’m doing
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I’m still running OTIS, 10 years later.
- For the 2025-2026 school year, OTIS will officially be a full-time job. Hence, I finally made OTIS into an LLC.
- That said, I feel like OTIS hasn’t evolved much in the last few years. The number of students has stabilized to around 750 per year, and I haven’t had many new ideas for topics or infrastructure. I feel like the program could use some fresh life.
- I’m also thinking about what might happen beyond competitions. In particular, the USA math contest ecosystem is crumbling, and I don’t want it to be the only pathway to math in the USA.
- I have signed on with OMEGA to help organize their first event. OMEGA is a new organization hoping to develop their own math contest series for students in the United States. It has many long-term ambitious goals, but the first half-year will be focused on running a single small event in May 2026 to get started. Almost everything about this pilot event is still “TBD”. We certainly have our work cut out for us.
- I am a math consultant for Axiom Math. To state my allegiances on the AI-in-math issue, I’m most interested in formalization, rather than just feeding contest problems to LLM’s for medal-bragging on Twitter (see Epoch and Xena on IMO 2025). I think making Lean into something that’s practically usable as a way to both verify and digitize proofs actually sounds pretty cool. arXiv:2311.00007 has some food for thought.
- Starting in January 2025, I’ve been occasionally studying some Korean. I don’t really have any compelling reason why; just a hobby. I haven’t actually learned anything and at most I can say some really basic sentences like 저는 멍청합니다 and 저는 고양이가 되고 싶습니다.
Recent checkpoints
- OTIS released its second puzzle hunt.
- I had a busy summer in 2025, where among other things, I taught at MOP as assistant director, visited the Duluth REU, and attended IMO 2025 as a coordinator (I was on problem 3 with Gheehyun Nahm).
- In March 2025, the 2025 Teammate Hunt aired. See the wrapup and author notes on my puzzle.
- In January 2025 I finished a multivariable calculus textbook that I wrote primarily during the fall of 2024, when I was teaching a recitation section. That book is now on MIT OpenCourseWare.