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 20 December 2025.
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 (as of December 2025) 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. I’ve just decided this is something I want to try. But I haven’t made much progress.
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.