Herman Chau

Office: Padelford C-111
Email: hchau [at sign] uw [full stop] edu

About

I'm a 3rd year graduate student in mathematics at the University of Washington doing research in algebraic combinatorics under Sara Billey. My research interests are in Coxeter groups and reduced expressions of permutations.

I previously worked as a software engineer at Facebook working on programming language servers and remote development tools.

My curriculum vitae is available here.

Teaching

Current: TA for MATH 394 (Probability I)

Office hours: Tuesdays 4 - 6 pm and Wednesdays 1 - 2 pm @ Padelford C-111.

Projects

• Summer 2022: I taught a computing course for math graduate students. Topics covered include graph algorithms, numerical linear algebra, Voronoi diagrams, Gröbner bases.
• Fall 2021 - Spring 2022: I organized a combinatorics seminar with graduate student speakers.
• Fall 2021: I mentored an undergraduate student Tammy Chau as part of the Washington Directed Reading Program (WDRP). She studied wallpaper groups and here are the slides for her final presentation.

Talks

• Commutation Classes of Permutations - Math and CS Seminar, November 2022, University of Puget Sound.

Fun Stuff

• I write puzzles for puzzle hunts. Here are three in increasing order of difficulty: The Shooting Gallery, Cross-stitched Words, Dispel the Bees.
• I participate in game jams as a hobby. My best games are Edna (8th out of 5304), Shuffolks! (19th out of 5712), and Limbo Library (24th out of 3206).