My full name is Timothy Wan Kai Yang. As of now, I am undertaking a PhD in Mathematics in the National University of Singapore.
As of now, My research interests lie in fluid dynamics, as well as perturbative methods for PDEs. My final year project in my undergraduate career was on using algebraic semantics to demonstrate a certain conservativity result in linear logic. I would also like to learn numerical methods a lot more seriously, as I want to be able to do numerical simulations of the various PDEs that I will inevitably study.
Aside from mathematics, I am a proficient keyboard warrior (hence this personal site), I fold origami occasionally, I solve some programming exercises and I play many PC games.
I am fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese, and I have completed the German language sequence in my undergraduate career. (In theory, this takes me to a ~B1 level.) I am also learning Japanese, in order to be able to watch Hololive streams without relying on translators or clippers, but I expect that this will take a long time. In this regard, I am going through the Japanese language sequence in the university now. Taking language classes is very fun, I gain a lot from it, and it also serves as a form of procrastination from actually doing serious mathematics. (Unfortunately, it seems that the host faculty now disallows graduate students from taking language courses. While I am not sure why, it seems I have to find some other productive forms of procrastination now.)
Goals for the Semester
This semester, I hope to learn enough math to be able to present somethign coherent for my oral qualifying exams. This will also serve as a time to narrow my research area and focus on something specific.
Texts/Notes that I am Reading
The purpose of this list is to publicly declare what texts I am reading so that I feel the social pressure to actually go through them.
- “Quasi-Periodic Solutions of Nonlinear Wave Equations on the $d$-dimensional Torus” by Berti and Bolle. Many talks that I have been fortunate to attend have a KAM-theoretic flavour, and I think it will be a good idea to understand it.
Other Things I Aim To Do
- I hope to run and gym twice a week to keep healthy.
- I am not sure how feasible this is, but I want to try learning some classical Japanese. It will probably be too hard, but I wouldn’t know until I have seriously tried. Now that I cannot take classes in the university anymore, it would require a lot more self-dicipline (which I have been running short of, lately) to do this too.