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 . This is my page on mathematics, computing and cycling.
Mathematics
I am currently in my Master’s degree in mathematics at the ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich). My focus of study has mostly turned to number theory, with one of my favourite courses being 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 ).
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 — which was the first proof that the decision problem of deciding primality lies in $\texttt{P}$.
Computing
I work as a digital lab assistent 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 my 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, turned to cycling one of few sports that one can do alone outside with fairly little equipment.
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) the rest was history. Since then I’ve ridden a few thousand kilometres around Switzerland and it’s been great for my mental and physical health. I can only recommend.
Below is a graphic of my total up-to-date cycling statistics, “YTD” meaning “Year To Date”.
As usual, I also did some research deep dives on cycling topics and will occasionally post the content of these here.
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.
The beautiful theme of this blog was designed by Jimmy Cai . I have removed some of the behind-the-scenes features, Google Analytics and the like.
Contact
Send me an email at rrueger[at]velleto.com.
Get my encryption keys here .