Welcome!
I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at Rutgers University, studying combinatorics. I am also a strategy board game enthusiast, a culinary adventurer, and tall. I come from the greatest place on earth, New York City—specifically the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Coordinates
- email:
- office: Hill Center room 608
- postal address:
Rutgers Department of Mathematics
110 Frelinghuysen Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854
How did I get here?
M.Sc. Applicable Mathematics, London School of Economics, 2010. My masters dissertation under Graham Brightwell, called “Maximal Antichains in Boolean Lattices,” won the Haya Freedman Prize for best dissertation from a student in the program.
A.B. Mathematics, Dartmouth College, 2009. Of particular importance was a reading course in game theory with Peter Winkler. Later I won Dartmouth’s $20,000 James B. Reynolds Scholarship for Foreign Study to fund my time at LSE.
Stuyvesant High School, 2006 (which I mention only out of pride for the first ever high school to have a featured article on wikipedia).
Research
I am interested in combinatorics, specifically extremal combinatorics, and even more specifically probabilistic methods in extremal combinatorics. My adviser is Jeff Kahn.
Secondary interests are recursion theory, set theory/infinitary combinatorics, and game theory.
I am also involved in some research on applications of combinatorics to homeland security with Rutgers’s CCICADA center, which does that kind of thing.
On January 31, 2013 I passed my oral qualifying exam (syllabus here) to advance to candidacy for the Ph.D. Here is a rather detailed account of the exam.
Here are the slides for a talk I gave on game theory at the Rutgers Math Department’s Graduate Student Pizza Seminar in January 2012, which tied for the Pizza Seminar Award recognizing the best talk each semester.
Teaching
Spring 2013
I am not teaching this semester, as I am supported by a US Department of Homeland Security Career Development Fellowship, funded through Rutgers’s CCICADA center.
Past teaching
Fall 12: Math 152, Calculus II for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences
Summer 12: Math 251, Multivariate Calculus
Spring 12: Math 112, Precalculus II (see also my course website)
Fall 11: Math 151, Calculus I for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences
Spring 11 [grading]: Math 421, Advanced Calculus for Engineering
Fall 10 [grading]: Math 421 and Math 428, Graph Theory
Random
- I founded the Rutgers Applied Game Theory Seminar (RAGS), a.k.a. weekly math department board game nights. If you’d like to play with us—I mean, attend our seminar—please email me and I’ll add you to our mailing list. Or, subscribe yourself.
- Want even more board games? In the New York area? Check out NerdNYC.
- In my email address, why jabar? This is from a college email address I adopted for myself, when Dartmouth’s email system allowed any user to immediately claim any alias. More to the point, it’s a combination of Jafar and Babar. I think that’s a pretty good summary of my personality.
- I submit that this is the best talk that has ever been given. I find it worth re-watching every few months or so.
- Improv Everywhere is a group that stages “missions” of public, participatory, prank-based performance art throughout New York City. They are brilliant. Here’s their founder speaking at TED.
Blog
Maybe this will happen at some point.
