About Me

Contact me, view my skills, see my opinions on various matters, and access my resume.

Contact

My email is ad@adamdeng.com - feel free to email with thoughts, questions, research ideas and proposals, academic requests, and so on. I welcome cold and/or unsolicited emails, so send away, whatever you're thinking!

Skills and Achievements

Top 5 Personality Strengths

#1 Creativity. I invent my own ideas and allow them to flow freely in my mind. It's 举一反三十.

#2 Learning Speed. Like ethernet, I am wired to interpret large amounts of information quickly.

#3 Enthusiasm. I possess a strong energy field and it's contagious in groups.

#4 Leadership. I'll lead us into battle, and I'll fight alongside my soldiers like Alexander the Great.

#5 Curiosity. There's too much I want to know. I'm like the Asian Tintin, except without a Snowy.

Top 5 Academic Strengths

#1 Mathematics. The core of my existence and my worldview; the key to success everywhere.

#2 Music. A direct consequence of emotion and spirit, not just vibrations or formulas!

#3 Geography. The merger of shapes, colors, and numbers—the 3 concepts I am most sensitive to.

#4 Languages. The merger of shapes, strategy, and numbers, just as the Triplex Mindset.

#5 Optimization. My PhD subject, the best merger of methodological (math/CS) and practical (decisions).

Languages

Quirks and Fun Details

Typing speed: 153 wpm English.

Oddly Specific Hobbies: making colorful infographics; printing out or drawing, then assembling, giant posters from letter paper.

Rare Abilities: perfect pitch; recognizing countries/territories from a snippet of its boundary; spitting typos and mistakes on slides.

Favorite Prime: 2134960875461231.

Weiqi/Go/Baduk Level: 2 kyu, ELO~1875.

Piano

(TCL is Trinity College London, a UK-based worldwide exam board in performing arts.)

May 2018: LTCL with Distinction. A 45-minute formal recital, equal to last-year undergraduate studies. See essay "For the Beauty of the Romantic."

May 2017: ATCL with Distinction. A 40-minute formal recital, equal to first-year undergraduate studies. See essay "A Baroque, Styrian, Furious Lark's Glory."

May 2016: TCL Advanced Certificate Exhibition Award. Highest score (perfect 100) out of all performers.

High School Olympiads/APs

From a previous lifetime.

Math: USAMO x2 ('19, '20). USAJMO x1 ('18). AIME x4 ('17 - '20). Top AMC 12: 132/150. Top AMC 10: 144/150.

Computing: USACO Gold '18-19.

Linguistics: NACLO Invitational '19. The top 10% in the Open Round go to the Invitational.

Physics: USAPhO '20. High school team won Physics Bowl '19; I was a team member (top 5 in school).

AP exams: 18 5's. Comp. Sci. A, Calc. AB, Phys. 1, Music Theory, Stat., Calc. BC, German, Eng. Lang., Phys. 2, Phys. C: Mech, Phys. C: E&M, Bio., US Hist., Chem., Eng. Lit., Comp. Gov., Psych., Art Hist.

Sundry Opinions

Math and CS

→ 1-indexing is utterly superior to 0-indexing.

(Deeply unpopular at MIT; possibly the most unpopular opinion among all of these. CS people and languages highly prefer 0-indexing, which represents offset or differential; math people and languages are more sympathetic to 1-indexing, which represents counting or "direct" numbers.)

→ Degrees are superior to radians.

(Inserting pi into angles is unacceptable encroachment. 360 is such a beautiful number anyways. Radians is irrational, simply put. Would you rather see 60º or 1.04719?)

→ Inclusive lower bound, exclusive upper bound in slicing is bad; inclusive-both is better.

(If you're going to screw things up, at least make up your mind and be consistent!)
Games/Sport

→ Chess is not a sport.

(I don't know how this one got started. But sitting there next to a board with 0.016% the area of a football field and moving virtually nothing except the hands every once in a while cannot be called a sport!)

→ Eliminate offside in soccer.

(The insanely low-scoring games and high frustration that comes with frequent disqualification of perfectly valid goals because someone was just barely over the line is disgraceful to soccer. I want to see more 6-5 scores and less 1-0's! The midfield is so boring anyways.)

→ Go should be predominantly known as weiqi instead; even baduk is preferable.

(Imagine making a new game and naming it "run". Good luck popularizing it.)

→ MIT should scrap its 100-yard swim test requirement for bachelor's graduation and replace it with a mile time requirement: 8:00 for males, 9:00 for females.

(In real life, you are far more likely to need to run away from enemies and dangers than swim away. Last time I checked, humans lived on land, not water. Therefore, pools are masochistic.)
Geo-related → Maryland's flag sucks. (It's way too involved, with incompatible patterns and colors. I would prefer the Liberian county flags over this.)
→ Spanish and Italian are much closer than either is to French. (Allegedly, in terms of linguistic similarity, French is closer to Spanish and Italian than they are to each other. Are you kidding me? If you listen to the three languages you will quickly realize that one of them is the odd one out, and it's neither Spanish nor Italian!)
→ English and Russian are closer than either is to Greek. (Most people disagree with me on this, especially Russian and Greek speakers. But the Cyrillic alphabet looks closer to the Latin one than the Greek one, and the space of pronounceable sounds is closest between English and Russian. Grammar-wise, I could be wrong. Maybe it's because I know German, so Russian grammar seems familiar. If God told me to renounce exactly one out of all my opinions, I'd choose this one.)
→ Chinese is closer to each of Japanese and Korean than they are to each other. (Some scholars suggest Japanese and Korean are closer to Turkish—and therefore each other—than Chinese, creating the "Altaic" language branch to serve their theories. So what if they're all SOV languages? Culture first! Japanese is on average 40% kanji, aka Chinese characters. And most of Korean is literally based off Chinese characters; the current alphabet wasn't even invented until well into the last millennium! There is very little influence between Japanese and Korean, even if they sound alike, which I agree with. But that's not enough to outweigh the fact that learning both Japanese and Korean are 10x easier if you know Chinese, while knowing JP won't help you with KR and vice versa. To prove this I will learn both Japanese and Korean. On a tangential note, in my opinion, the "personalities" and cultural practices of Japan and Korea are infinitely closer to each other's than either one's are to China's.)

Resume

Email ad@adamdeng.com!