jerzhou's projects
Here are some notable projects that I’ve worked on.
CS
I created this website out of GitHub Pages because a) I need a personal website and b) I thought it’d be nice to have a concise way of collecting all the various things I’ve worked on and interests I have. The site is built on Jekyll, and I’ve been using a lot of JavaScript (e.g. React, D3) to make it more fun.
MIT IDSS social media project
This project is involved with the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Right now, I’m working on creating an Android app that can collect social media browsing data from consenting users. I also learned how to use the Appium framework as a cross-platform testing automation tool.
MIT xFair application portal
I’m a developer and board member for xFair, an annual student-run career fair at MIT. My main dev work was on the sponsor application portal, which was written with the MEN stack (MongoDB, Express, Node). I also did some corporate relations work, which was surprisingly more fun than I expected.
I co-directed my high school’s annual math competition, the Math Open at Andover. Among many other organizational and logistical things, I migrated the website onto a dynamic framework (Django) and implemented a bunch of new functionality, such as registration and answer submission. This required me to combine my frontend (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) and backend (PostgreSQL) knowledge, and it was also the first time I deployed a site onto an actual remote server (not Heroku).
Female Heads of State Across the World
A project suggested by a teacher to commemorate the anniversary of the gender studies center at my school. I worked with a group of 5 for few months, and we presented the project for the school at the aforementioned anniversary.
My final project for my full stack web development class, which used a D3 force simulation (on top of a regular Django framework plus database) to create a nice “floating graph” effect. I think this is a cool concept, but if I actually want to publish this site I probably need to improve the UI quite a bit.
Other projects from Full Stack
- slackers - a simple chat app
- wheredoyoulive - an app allowing users to add “points of interest” using Google Maps API
- spotify-cards - displays a list of recent Spotify releases using the Spotify API
I was bored in AP Computer Science so I made a few interesting projects.
- NeuralNetwork - a barely functional neural network in pure Java (why??)
- TransformationAnimation - domain coloring for complex valued functions using JavaX Swing
- PhysicsSimulation - simulation of many particles in a box with collisions
- MazeSearchAnimation - animations of search algorithms using Java Applet, e.g. DFS, BFS etc.
- SortAnimation - animations of sorting algorithms using Java Applet, e.g. comb sort, quicksort etc.
Math
MIT DRP algebraic geometry reading group
For the 2022 MIT Mathematics Directed Reading Program, I read (the first few chapters of) the infamous book Algebraic Geometry by Robin Hartshorne. It was a pretty fun speedrun of foundational algebraic geometry concepts, such as schemes, quasicoherent sheaves, etc. My reading partner and I also did a final presentation on the relationship between the Picard group and the divisor class group.
A mathematical journaling journey
This was a personal project in the form of a massive LaTeX document that I worked on for a large part of 2020 summer. During that time, I was really interested in advanced math, mostly algebraic topology, category theory, and algebraic geometry, and just threw all of the things I learned onto this document. I specifically went down a Jacob Lurie-focused rabbit hole for a while, which included attempting to learn a lot of homotopy theory and higher category theory (he maintains a free website, Kerodon). Actually, inspired by Kerodon and another great resource, the Stacks project, I was thinking of creating an online textbook full of examples and diagrams of various kinds of (co)homology. Also, maybe one day I’ll go back and try to understand higher topos theory.
A quasisymmetric graph polynomial
I participated in the MIT Program for Research In Mathematics, Engineering and Science in 2019, working on a project regarding a certain quasisymmetric graph invariant, and I continued working on the project through 2020. I actually got a lot better at combinatorics, and I became interested in algebraic combinatorics (though largely not of the sort that I used in the project).
Physics
Simulating ferroelectric domains
I worked on a numerical simulation to support an in-progress research paper dealing with ferroelectric domains. As it turns out, at the scale of ferroelectric domains and other condensed matter physics, there is this interesting middle ground where classical mechanics is no longer accurate, but a quantum mechanical model would have too many moving parts to be useful. The model that I used was essentially a polynomial approximation to the true potential function with some experimentally determined parameters.
Graphic design
I worked for several years in the graphic design section of my high school newspaper. I actually only joined the section because I thought it sounded interesting, even though I didn’t know what graphic design was at the time. The people running the section at the time were very supportive, and I caught up on Adobe Illustrator and graphic design fundamentals pretty quickly. The most interesting project I worked on was the State of the Academy, an annual newspaper issue composed entirely of graphics visualizing the results of the school-wide survey of the same name.