zitong

hi! i'm a 3rd-year undergrad studying cse and math at uw. i like math, sports, music, and one piece.

Food for thought:

what are all the perfect squares ending in 444?

Research

My research interests lie at the intersection of math and computer science... which is basically everything. But I'm only a 3rd-year so idrk yet tbh. Though I am particularly interested in computational number theory and its applications in tcs.

Efficient Auditing for Public-Key Infrastructure

26wi - present

Independent research • Advisor: Prof. Nirvan Tyagi

Finding an efficient way to help end-to-end messaging users detect if or when they get cheated on

Deep Learning for Number Theory

25au - present

Math AI Research Lab • Advisors: Junaid Hasan, Prof. Jarod Alper

Tried to prove Peter Sarnak wrong with transformers (obv failed). Now exploring things in number theory that shallow transformers can learn via mechanistic interpretability.

Publications: In preparation

Direct Reading Program - Analytic Number Theory

25wi

Washington Direct Reading Program (WDRP) • Mentor: Zawad Choudhury

Spent some time studying arithmetic funuctions, Dirichlet multiplication, among other things. Presented my findings, and met some goats.

Experience

Lead Teaching Assistant

24au - present

Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science

Intro to Programmming (CSE 122) and Hardware/Software Interface (CSE 351)

Software Engineering Intern

25su

Capital One

Engineered langgraph ai agent to automate controls monitoring

Projects

Stock Price Estimation

Python, matlab, NumPy, PyTorch

Attempted to predict stock trends using pca, mle, and a simple neural net. ~7% mean average error.

TimeSync

React, html/css, JavaScript, Google Cloud, sql

Calendar sync web app to help you find free time for meetings. My first full-stack project! Built with react and firebase cloud db, hosted on Vercel.

Coursework

All courses are taken at uw. Sometimes for a few select cs and math classes I will type out notes in LaTeX. Because they were typed live in lecture, you may find mistakes. Please email me if you do, and I may choose to ignore you. Also shoutout to my goat Duc Vu for the inspo (he does not know who i am and i am parasocial).

Mathematics

MATH 403 - Modern Algebra II (Groups)
MATH 402 - Modern Algebra I (Rings)
MATH 327 - Intro to Real Analysis
AMATH 353 - PDEs and Waves

Computer Science

CSE 422 - Advanced Modern Algorithms
CSE 426 - Cryptography
CSE 421 - Algorithms
CSE 312 - Probabilities I
CSE 311 - Discrete Math & Logic