Sometimes it’s the missteps in life that lead to the greatest adventures down the road.

For me, my pursuit of a Ph.D. in mathematics, specifically in algebraic combinatorics, might be traced back to my freshman year as an undergraduate at MIT. Coming off of a series of successes in high school math competitions and other science-related endeavors (thanks to my loving and very mathematical family!), I was a confident and excited 18-year old whose dream was to become a physicist and use my mathematical skills to, I don’t know, come up with a unified field theory or something.

Me at the age of 18-ish.

But I loved pure math too, and a number of my friends were signed up for the undergraduate Algebraic Combinatorics class in the spring, so my young ambitious self added it to my already packed course load. I had no idea what “Algebraic Combinatorics” even meant, but I did hear that it was being taught by Richard Stanley, a world expert in the area. How could I pass up that chance? What if he didn’t teach it again before I left MIT?

On the first day of the class, Stanley started with a simple combinatorial question. It was something like the following: In a complete graph with $n$ vertices, how many walks of length $k$ starting at vertex $v$ end up back at vertex $v$ on the last step? For instance, if $n=5$ and $k=2$, the graph looks like: and there are four closed walks of length two, from $v$ to any other vertex and back again:

There is an elementary (though messy) way to solve this, but Stanley went forth with an algebraic proof. He considered the adjacency matrix $A$ of the complete graph, and showed that the total number of loops of length $k$ starting from any vertex is the trace of $A^k$. One can then compute this trace using eigenvalues and divide by $n$ to get the number of loops starting at $v$. Beautiful!

I remember sitting in my seat, wide-eyed, watching Richard Stanley quietly but authoritatively discuss the technique. It was incredible to me that advanced tools from linear algebra could be used to so elegantly solve such a simple, concrete problem. To use a term from another area of algebraic combinatorics, I was hooked.

But I was also a freshman, and didn’t yet have a strong grasp of some of the other algebraic concepts being used in the course. I studied hard but wound up with a B+ in the class. Me, get a B+ in a math class? I was horrified, my 18-year-old Little-Miss-Perfect confidence shattered. Now, not only was I fascinated with the subject, I gained respect for it. It was a worthy challenge, and I couldn’t help but come back for more.

In the years that followed, I took more courses on similar subjects and wrote several undergraduate research papers. I dabbled in other areas as well, but was always drawn back to the interplay between combinatorics and algebra. I now find myself, as of Friday, May 20, 2016, having completed my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley on a topic in algebraic combinatorics…

…and I often wonder how much that silly little B+ motivated me throughout the years.

(See page 2 for a summary of my thesis. My full thesis can be found here.)