About
Hello, my name is Ryan. I (he/him/they) am a mathematics student and tutor at ETH Zürich. I work part time as a research assistant at the AI research company DynAikon. I also help run the alternative coffee collective Irrational Coffee and am on the board of the student cycling organisation in Zürich Velove.
Mathematics
I am currently in my Master’s degree in mathematics at the ETH Zürich, writing my thesis at IBM Zurich under the supervision of Luca De Feo on the computation of the ideal class-group action on ordinary elliptic curves using higher dimensional methods.
My bachelor’s thesis, supervised by Professor Rahul Pandharipande, is an exposition of the paper Primality testing with Gaussian Periods authored by H.W. Lenstra and Carl Pomerance. This paper contains the asymptotically fastest (currently) known deterministic, unconditional and general primality test with running time ${\log(n)}^6 {(2 + \log(\log(n))}^c$ for an effectively computable constant $c$. This is an improvement on the result ${\log(n)}^{(21/2)} {(2 + \log(\log(n))}^c$ proven by Agrawal, Kayal and Saxena in 2002 in their landmark paper “Primes in $\texttt{P}$”.
One of my favourite courses of my bachelor’s degree was Professor Kowalski’s Probabilistic Number Theory. In this course we investigated objects of arithmetic interest using probabilistic methods: for example the distribution of primes in residue classes (The Chebyshev Bias).
Computing
I work as a digital lab assistant in the Artificial Intelligence research company DynAikon. Here I ensure that the other researchers are equipped with a practical working technical infrastructure: working compute- and web-servers.
As part of my mathematical studies, I have also taken courses in Cryptography and Theoretical Computer Science.
In my free time, I enjoy tinkering with Linux/GNU/FLOSS projects, resulting in
my varying proficiency in Python, $\text{\LaTeX}$, Bash and the associated
standard UNIX tools git, sed, awk, grep, etc.
Using programs like vim as my main editor, neomutt to read my emails from the terminal, i3 (and more recently sway) as my window manager and ArchLinux as my daily driver OS, has lead me down various rabbit holes of configuration, which have been incredibly rich learning experiences on how many layers of an operating system work; starting from partitioning schemes and file systems to networking and how the X-window server works.
Some of my projects, in assorted levels of completeness, are available on my GitHub profile.
Cycling
During the start COVID-19 pandemic I, like many others, started cycling. After a few rides on my old city bike, I bought a road bike and after a very long wait (induced by the demand of all the Corona-Cyclists™ like myself) I was all set to discover Switzerland by bike. Since then I’ve ridden a ~15,000 kilometres around up and down this beautiful country.
Below is a graphic of my total up-to-date cycling statistics, “YTD” meaning “Year To Date”.
About this blog
This blog is powered by Hugo, an open source static site generator. It is easily configured and managed via an assortment of markdown files and html/css templates.
This is rather convenient, since the files are regular text files which can be
managed through a version control system like git, are easily backed up and
restored. Moreover, serving static files mitigates many security issues that
services like WordPress struggle with.
Contact
Send me an email at rrueger ät velleto.com.
Get my encryption keys here.