Hello there!

Hello! My name is Timothy (but my friends usually call me Timo) and I am a PhD student in mathematics at the National University of Singapore (NUS). As I was beginning my PhD studies in NUS, I had decided to set up a personal page, to serve as a way to introduce myself and my work to others, as well as to have a place to write my ideas.

This webpage is a work in progress! There are many things that I want to do, but I am not familiar enough with Hugo (the content management system) or the theme to implement them immediately. For example, I am trying to set up a comment system with utterances, and I would like to tweak the colours a little.

If you would like to contact me for some reason, you can do so via my email at timothywan dot ky at gmail dot com. Enjoy your stay!

Inverse Spectral Theory Part 02: Properties of the Fundamental Solutions

In the previous part we have constructed our two fundamental solutions $y_1$ and $y_2$ to the ODE $$ -y_j^{\prime\prime} + q(x)y_j = \lambda y_j, $$ with initial data $$ y_1(0) = y_2^\prime(0) = 1,\quad y_1^\prime(0) = y_2(0) = 0. $$ The goal of this section is to establish useful facts about the $y_j$, for we need to use them in the later sections to establish meaningful results. These facts come in the form of estimates, knowledge about the (partial) derivatives of the $y_j$, as well as analyticity properties. ...

August 16, 2026 · 11 min · 2310 words · Me

Inverse Spectral Theory Part 00: Introduction

A while ago, while I was doing some readings, I found a result that worked for ‘‘an open dense set of nonlinearities’’. Putting aside what this really means, I found out that to establish this fact, one had to effectively reconstruct a differential operator from its eigenvalues. I found it rather fascinating, and took a shallow dive into this topic. Unfortunately, a lot of these were not getting into my head, and so I volunteered to do a talk series in my university’s unofficial mathematics Discord chat. But to do so would require me to prepare notes, which I did, but they were not to my standard, and so I am redoing them, this time in an online format here, so that I can finally do the talks and finally learn inverse spectral theory. ...

August 9, 2026 · 4 min · 732 words · Me

Inverse Spectral Theory Part 01: Power Series Methods for ODEs

The problem that will concern us for the next two parts will be the initial value problem $$\begin{cases} \tag{\#} -y^{\prime\prime} + q(x)y = \lambda y \text{ for $x\in[0,1]$,} \\ y(0) = a, y^{\prime}(0) = b. \end{cases}$$ Here $q(x)$ lies in $L^2_\mathbb{C}([0,1])$, which we will recall to be the space of complex-valued square-integrable functions on $[0,1]$. Also, $\lambda, a, b$ are complex numbers. In the future, we will only concern ourselves with real-valued $q$, but it is very convenient to work with complex-valued $q$ now, as it will let us avail ourselves of complex-analytic tools. ...

August 9, 2026 · 8 min · 1630 words · Me

A Simple Randomized Matrix Multiplication Algorithm 2

The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. – Sir Francis Galton This post is the continuation of the previous post over here. Last Time In the previous post, we began the analysis of a randomized matrix multiplication algorithm. We managed to prove that the output of the algorithm gives us our product $AB$ in expectation, and furthermore, that the expected squared deviation $\mathbb{E}[\|D-AB\|_F^2]$ satisfies ...

August 10, 2025 · 4 min · 836 words · Me

A Simple Randomized Matrix Multiplication Algorithm 1

千里之行,始於足下。 [The journey of a thousand miles begins with a simple step.] – Lao Tzu Introduction We all have to start somewhere, and I have decided to start the blog with something simple, that most people in the quantitative sciences would have to deal with at some point in their lives: matrix multiplication. Performing matrix multiplication fast is important for many applications, like machine learning or numerical methods. We will consider matrices (square of order $n$, for simplicity) $A=(a_{ij})_{i,j=1}^n$, and $B=(b_{ij})_{i,j=1}^n$, think about ways to evaluate $AB$. The simplest, most naive algorithm would be as follows: ...

August 9, 2025 · 5 min · 960 words · Me