Mathews Boban

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where I am privileged to be advised by Thomas Rothvoss. I am broadly interested in theoretical computer science. Currently, I work on discrepancy theory and convex geometry. My CV is available here.

Past positions

June - August 2024
- Research assistant at NUS Statistics and Data Science, Singapore. Advisor: Michael Choi
Feb. - May 2024
- Visitor at the Center for Quantum Technologies, NUS, Singapore. Advisor: Rahul Jain
Feb. 2023 - Feb. 2024
- Research assistant at NUS School of Computing, Singapore. Advisor: Arnab Bhattacharyya
Nov. 2021 - Aug. 2022
- Research intern at Technion, Haifa. Advisor: Yuval Filmus
July 2017 - May 2021
- B.Tech. (Hons.) in Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay.

Publications

(author ordering is alphabetical in all papers, following the theoretical computer science practice)

Learning low-degree polynomials over the reals under adversarial infinity-norm noise.
- Vipul Arora, Arnab Bhattacharyya, Mathews Boban, and Yuval Filmus
- PDF

Outlier Robust Multivariate Polynomial Regression
- Vipul Arora, Arnab Bhattacharyya, Mathews Boban, Venkatesan Guruswami, and Esty Kelman
- Arxiv

Some Extensions of FKN and Kindler–Safra Theorems to Lq norms
- Mathews Boban and Yuval Filmus
- Unpublished manuscript; PDF

Notes

On stochastic calculus and Boolean functions
- PDF

Contact

Email: mathewsboban242 [at] gmail [dot] com

Miscellaneous

Some essays by Oded Goldreich:
- On "rejection"
  - see also We should see other people by Luca Trevisan.
- On Struggle and Competition in Scientific Fields
- On offering advice to aspiring scientists

Ravi Vakil's advice for his potential PhD students
- Highlight: "mathematics is so rich and infinite that it is impossible to learn it systematically, and if you wait to master one topic before moving on to the next, you'll never get anywhere. Instead, you'll have tendrils of knowledge extending far from your comfort zone. Then you can later backfill from these tendrils, and extend your comfort zone; this is much easier to do than learning "forwards". (Caution: this backfilling is necessary. There can be a temptation to learn lots of fancy words and to use them in fancy sentences without being able to say precisely what you mean. You should feel free to do that, but you should always feel a pang of guilt when you do.)"

Will Sawin's advice on maths research
- Short description: Learn everything in your sub-sub-area.

Some essays by Terry Tao:
- Continually aim just beyond your current range
- Does one have to be a genius to do maths?

Fan Chung's graduate school advice.

Some coping strategies for failure and rejection.