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Cool People

Date Written: August 30, 2022; Last Modified: April 7, 2024

Here’s a list of people that have influenced my budding career in mathematics one way or another. I appreciate every one of these people for the impact they’ve had on my life, whether they know it or not. If you’re on this list and wish to be taken off, please let me know and I’ll take care of it!

There are many more people that have influenced my life in general, and I’m very grateful to them as well. Perhaps I’ll make a separate page for them some other time.

• Liz — The Girlfriend. She has pestered me nearly nonstop to get added to this page, but only just recently has she furnished a website! She is not a mathematician but that is okay; she is a very loving girlfriend and has been nothing but kind and supportive in the many years I’ve known her. (She’s also like two and a half feet tall.)

Friends

• Mealaud (Mel) Mokhtarzad — A very good friend I met in our graduate complex analysis course. We worked on a homework assignment together, I weirded him out by wearing cat ears, and we found out we got along really well.
• Jaspreet (Jas) Singh — A very cool guy that was my mentor for the directed reading program at UCLA. He’s very approachable, gives great advice, and definitely helped me figure stuff out.

Professors

• Professor Andrew Blumberg — I’ve never taken any classes with him, but Professor Blumberg was kind enough to talk to me and give some incredibly helpful advice about higher education in graduate school and in academia. Much of my advice came from peers and mentors, so learning about his perspective allowed me to consider a lot of things I would have never otherwise thought about.
• Professor Robert Greene — Professor Greene radiates wisdom and intelligence. Many of my classmates didn’t like his lectures very much, but I (controversially) found that his lectures have been clear and brimming with insight. I took undergraduate real analysis with him, and it’s what kicked off a delayed chain reaction leading to my passion in mathematics.
• Professor Mike Hill — Perhaps the friendliest and most approachable professor I’ve had at UCLA. He’s a great lecturer and teacher, is incredibly knowledgeable, yet he’s also super down-to-earth and humble. I honestly found myself deeply inspired by him; he’s the type of professor I’d like to be.
• Professor Emily Riehl — Another brilliant and inspiration mathematician. I have never directly interacted with her, though I did attend her UCLA distinguished lecture series on some crazy things that went over my head. What inspires me about her is that not only is she an incredibly accomplished mathematician, but she even played rugby and performed in a band. I look up to that balance of personal and academic passion a lot.
• Professor Romyar Sharifi — Nobody in the world should have the right to be this good at algebra. I have heard epic poems and legends written in old English about his abilities. Professor Sharifi was my ring theory professor, and I think he’s the one that showed me what it really means to challenge oneself mathematically.
• Professor Terence Tao — What amazes me about Professor Tao is how productive he is: there are so many notes and pieces of advice and posts on his blog, and what’s more, they’re all so succinct, eloquent, and organised. I learned so much just by reading things on his website, and I want to be able to provide a fraction of that to the math community over the course of my lifetime.