Tagged: mathematics
12 results
Po-Shen Loh
Carnegie Mellon math professor and former U.S. Math Olympiad coach Po-Shen Loh argues that as AI surpasses humans at logic and language, the most important skill young people can develop is autonomous thinking. He warns that using AI to do school writing is 'like driving a car one mile for exercise,' explains why AI now solves original Olympiad problems he couldn't, and lays out a win-win-win education ecosystem that pairs middle schoolers, high-school math talent, and Broadway-caliber acting coaches to teach kids how to generate their own ideas, empathize, and think critically in an age of biased information.
Ken Ono: The Mathematician Who Stopped Racing the Machine
Mathematician Ken Ono recounts the year that upended his identity: hired to invent problems hard enough to stump ChatGPT for the FrontierMath project, he discovered that large language models now know more facts than any human alive. Rather than despairing about how to 'stay ahead of AI,' Ono argues that is the wrong question entirely. He reframes intelligence as the human capacity to ask new questions, create concepts, and connect ideas across fields, weaving in the story of self-taught genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, his own near-dropout youth, and a plea to rescue the wonder that machines can never replicate.
Bill Wells
Bill Wells is the CEO of AMPL Optimization Inc., the Mountain View company behind AMPL, the algebraic modeling language born at Bell Labs that has long been a gold standard for large-scale mathematical optimization. A UC Berkeley-trained mathematician, Wells runs the small but globally influential team that turns business-critical decisions in energy, finance, supply chain, and transportation into solvable models, while steering the company from a classic modeling language toward a modern, API-driven optimization platform.
Justin Merickel
Justin Merickel is a Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for the Analytics Portfolio at Adobe, where he oversees Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Mix Modeler. With over two decades of experience in digital marketing and data analytics, he has shaped how enterprise brands measure, understand, and act on customer behavior - from his early days at McCann Erickson through senior leadership at Yahoo!, Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), and ultimately Adobe itself, where he has driven major product and partnership initiatives across the Experience Cloud.
Sue Khim
Sue Khim is the CEO and co-founder of Brilliant.org, an interactive STEM learning platform serving over 10 million users in 150+ countries. Born in South Korea and raised in Chicago, she studied mathematics at the University of Chicago before leaving to found Alltuition, a student financial aid startup, in 2009. That team pivoted in 2012 to build Brilliant, which has since raised over $90 million in venture funding and become one of the most widely used platforms for self-paced math and science education. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education and recognized by Apple as an AAPI leader in tech, Khim is focused on replacing rote memorization with genuine conceptual understanding at global scale.
Raghav Gulati
Raghav Gulati is a San Francisco-based technologist and executive who built CoinList into one of crypto's most recognized token launch platforms before transitioning to partner at Ravikant Capital. A University of Georgia mathematics graduate who cut his teeth as a software engineer at companies like Backplane and Shyp, Gulati rose through CoinList from engineer to CEO, helping orchestrate landmark token sales including Solana's early raise. His vision: make regulated token launches as accessible to 330 million Americans as equity markets, with Solana as the decentralized NASDAQ.
Yash Kewalramani
Yash Kewalramani is the co-founder of Cherry App, a Bengaluru-based social commerce startup that pays Instagram creators cashback for shopping and sharing. Backed by All In Capital, Cherry lets users earn 30-70% cashback by posting about brands on social media - turning everyday shoppers into micro-marketers. A Swarthmore College mathematics and economics graduate, Yash previously worked as a product manager at Jupiter and at Adappt Intelligence before launching Cherry in 2024 with co-founders Sharnam Singhwal and Samarth Mahapatra.
Mary Jane Elmore
Mary Jane (MJ) Elmore is a pioneering venture capitalist who joined IVP (Institutional Venture Partners) in 1982 and became one of the first female General Partners in American venture capital history. Over a four-decade career spanning eight IVP funds, she backed transformative technology companies in software, communications, and computer-aided engineering. Now a Limited Partner and active angel investor through Broadway Angels and Sand Hill Angels, she has reinvented herself as an oil painter - applying the same mathematical precision that made her a formidable investor to abstract landscapes and architecture.
Anas Biad
Anas Biad is a Partner at Sequoia Capital based in London, where he invests in early-to-growth-stage companies across enterprise software, AI, SaaS, gaming, and fintech. A mathematics graduate of Ecole Polytechnique who grew up in Casablanca, he spent time at Bain & Company and Silver Lake before joining Sequoia in 2021 as one of its first European partners. He backs founders building enduring companies across Europe and is known for his passion for gaming, quantum computing, and his admiration for Richard Feynman.
Markos Georghiades
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.
Charles Hoskinson
Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output (IOHK), one of the five original co-founders of Ethereum, and a polarizing figure in cryptocurrency who left Ethereum over a for-profit vs. nonprofit dispute. He now runs a peer-reviewed blockchain platform, owns an 11,000-acre buffalo ranch in Wyoming, funds alien-hunting expeditions, donated $20 million to Carnegie Mellon for formal mathematics research, and is pioneering anti-aging medicine while building political influence through his Wyoming Integrity PAC.
Vlad Tenev
Vlad Tenev is the Bulgarian-American co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets, the company that forced Wall Street to abolish trading commissions and put a brokerage in every pocket. Born in Varna, Bulgaria, and raised in Virginia after emigrating at age 5, Tenev studied mathematics at Stanford and UCLA before dropping his PhD to build trading software startups. In 2013, he and Baiju Bhatt launched Robinhood to give ordinary people the same tools as professional traders - for free. After navigating the GameStop firestorm, congressional testimony, a bruising post-IPO collapse, and two rounds of layoffs, Tenev rebuilt Robinhood into a diversified financial platform now worth nearly $100 billion and included in the S&P 500. He also co-founded Harmonic, an AI startup pursuing mathematical superintelligence, which reached a $1.45 billion valuation in 2025 after its AI model won a Gold Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.