Hiya there— welcome to my website!

I’m Kye Shi, a second-year mathematics PhD student and teaching assistant at UCLA (you might also know me as a junior coach for the U.S. Physics Olympiad team, or an apprentice instructor for MathILy). I graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2022 with a joint degree in math and computer science.

Besides math, I enjoy other nerdy things like web development, competitive programming, functional programming, and Linux desktop “ricing”. I’m also into less-nerdy things like west-coast-swing and ballroom dancing, cooking, pool, jazz drumming, wheel-throwing, and table tennis (though that is not to say that I’m necessarily any good at any of these things).

academic writings and publications

• Games for one, games for two: computationally-complex fun for polynomial-hierarchical families (2022).

  This is my undergraduate senior thesis on graph coloring games and the polynomial hierarchy. It contains an approachable (so I hope), intuition-driven introduction to some core concepts in complexity theory, and presents a generalization of the $\mathbf{NP}$-complete graph 3-coloring puzzle to the polynomial hierarchy.

  Source code for the thesis and other related content (e.g., presentations and posters I had to make throughout the year) are published on GitHub.

other stuff I’m proud of

• slick: a toy programming language my friend Cole and I created for the repl.it language jam in 2020. It’s a functional programming language with ML-style static typing (i.e., similar to Haskell, OCaml, Elm, etc.), but supplemented with “row polymorphic” type inference for both records and variants in order to make the type system feel as flexible and unrestricting as possible, without sacrificing on soundness. If you’re curious to learn more, check out the tutorial and/or try Slick on Riju!

• pikachu-tikz: the “surprised pikachu” meme, meticulously illustrated in TikZ (the $\LaTeX$ graphics/diagramming library). I spent an entire day making this in 2019 to flex my TikZ skills and garner likes on a silly math memes Facebook group.

• thurston: an interactive web app demonstrating Thurston’s discrete conformal-mapping theorem (a.k.a. Thurston’s circle-packings conjecture), which I created as my final project for Terry Tao’s graduate complex analysis course at UCLA (Math246C). Source code on GitHub.

• my Advent of Code solutions: I’m by no means an expert at competitive programming, but I’m decent enough to have made it to the leaderboard several times (31st place overall in 2019, 53rd in 2020, and 66th in 2022).

wanna talk to me?

• email: [email protected]
• office (UCLA): MS3903